MCN Columnists
Leonard Klady

Klady By Leonard KladyKlady@moviecitynews.com

The Weekend Report: March 20, 2011

The erosion of the under 25 crowd continued this week with only Paul registering a 50/50 split for that line in the sand according to exit polling. Limitless was 56% attended by plus 25s and The Lincoln Lawyer had a staggering 85% older audience – 49% of which was 40 years old or greater.

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The Weekend Report: January 30, 2011

The debut of the ExoRcIsT-lite The Rite possessed the top of the weekend box office charts with an estimated $14.7 million. In another soft film going frame the other national opener The Mechanic ranked fifth with an $11.1 million bow.

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Weekend Report: January 23, 2011

Zonk Went the Strings of My Heart  The debut of rom-com No Strings Attached led weekend box office sales with an estimated $20.3 million. It was the session’s only national debut in what proved to be a depressed marketplace. Also new were several late year Oscar hopefuls. The endurance saga No Way Back struggled to…

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Weekend Box Office Report – November 14

Take the A Train The animated Megamind with an estimated gross of $29.9 million again topped the weekend viewing charts despite a trio of new contenders in the marketplace. Second on the rails was the kinetic Unstoppable with $23.2 million while the District 9 homage Skyline slotted fourth with $11.5 million and echoes of Broadcast…

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Weekend Box Office Report – November 7

The latest from DreamWorks Animation, Megamind, was generally pegged to debut in a mid-$40 million arena though some felt it could have performed better on a less competitive weekend. Though that contention is dubious, the rest of the year really doesn’t offer that option with both pre-sold and award titles beginning to open up the multiplex floodgates.

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Weekend Box Office Report – September 26

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps topped the weekend box office charts with a logy estimate of $19.5 million. The new batch of national releases generally underperformed based on tracking including second place Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga Hoole, which hooted up $16.3 million.

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Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie: Perspectives

C’est fini le fete international de film de Toronto. To be honest, the eleven days of the somewhat revamped Toronto International Film Festival are a blur. Three or four films a day, three or four hours of writing a night, one reception, innumerable dangling conversations and what do you get. The best I can come…

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Weekend Box Office Report – September 19

Though The Town was clearly out-pacing its competition in advance ticket sales, tracking pundits pegged the latter day Ridgemont High antics of Easy A as the box office leader for the frame. Devil was expected to be very close behind the duo.

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The Weekend Box Office Report

  Weekend Estimates – September 10-12, 2010 Title Distributor Gross (average) change Theaters Cume Resident Evil: Afterlife Sony 26.9 (8,390) New 3203 26.9 Takers Sony 5.9 (2,710) -45% 2191 47.9 The American Focus 5.7 (2,020) -57% 2833 28.2 Machete Fox 4.1 (1,520) -64% 2678 20.7 Going the Distance WB 3.8 (1,260) -45% 3030 14 The…

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Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie

One anticipated film that Toronto received the very first look see is Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter. It screened yesterday for press including the army of junket scribes that attend about 20 interview roundtables during TIFF’s opening weekend. They were grumbling about the filmmaker only doing two interviews during his stay and having to go to New York in October for the official press junket.

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Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie

Toronto has also evolved along these lines. It runs arguably the best programmed cinematheque in North America, touring film programs and underwrites scholarly research and publications that otherwise would be marginalized. The Lightbox marketing employs the catch phrase: The House That Film Built and, considering past good works, it should be a home base that’s both state of the art and sturdy.

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Bang Bang Man Moron

It was déjà vu all over again as funny buddy cops and stereoscopic hip hoppers joined the summer box office fray. The cruiser bruisers of The Other Guy debuted at the top of the movie charts with an estimated $35.7 million while the foot stompers of Step Up 3D slotted third overall with a disappointing…

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Guillaume Canet’s Series of Most Fortunate Events

Considered one of the most versatile leading actors of contemporary French cinema, Guillaume Canet self-confesses that stardom –even the prospect of becoming a working performer — was a series of accidents. Canet, 37, is ostensibly in Los Angeles for a few days to promote the film Farewell, a fact-based thriller about a French functionary in…

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The Weekend Report: July 11, 2010

Despicable Me animated weekend movie-going and easily outpaced the competition with an estimated debut gross of $60.3 million. The frame’s other national freshman, the sci-fi Predators, also posted impressive initial returns of $25 million to rank third, with The Twilight Saga: Eclipse weathering the onslaught quite well with a 50% hit that translated into an…

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The Weekend Report: July 5, 2010

Weekend Estimates: July 2-5, 2010 Title Distributor Gross (average) % change * Theaters Cume Twilight: Eclipse Summit 84.3 (18,870) New 4468 177.1 The Last Airbender Par 53.4 (16,860) New 3169 69.8 Toy Story 3 BV 42.3 (10,510) -49% 4028 301.2 Grown Ups Sony 26.6 (7,520) -53% 3534 85.2 Knight and Day Fox 14.1 (4,540) -49%…

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Toy Boys and the Billion Dollar Babies

To no great surprise Toy Story 3 retained top position in weekend ticket sales with an estimated $58.7 million. The frame’s two national freshmen also landed in anticipated order with the arrested development comedy Grown Ups performing better than expected with $40.5 million and the star driven action comedy Knight and Day underwhelming with $19.4…

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To Finity … And Beyawned

June 20, 2010 The highly anticipated Toy Story 3 arrived right on target with an estimated $110.2 million debut, which marked the biggest (unadjusted) opening for a Pixar movie. The week’s other incoming title Johah Hex wound up with an accursed $4.9 million that ranked it seventh in the weekend lineup. The session also featured…

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If You Build It, Will They Come?

The Los Angeles Film Festival kicks off Thursday night with a curtain raiser of The Kids Are All Right, which won awards and commercial distribution following its premiere at Sundance in January. And despite its relative nascence, LAFF is attempting to do a bit of re-imagining. The most obvious change is its location. Following home bases in Hollywood and Westwood,…

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Chop Chop

June 13, 2010 Industry trackers were virtually unanimous that The A-Team would be top dog among weekend movie goers with the re-imagined The Karate Kid a competitive but distinct runner up. However, whether it was a poor sampler or respondents were too embarrassed to divulge their honest sentiments, ticket sales provided a radically different conclusion….

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Clash of the Lilliputians

June 6 , 2010 There wasn’t sufficient love for a quartet of new national releases and virtually by default Shrek Forever After emerged as the top title at the weekend box office with an estimated $2x.x million. Among the debutante set comedy prevailed with Get Him to the Greek ranking second with $17.3 million while…

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Klady

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Quote Unquotesee all »

“I’m in Locarno, my movie is premiering for 1,000 people, which is nuts. A huge-ass screening, second day of the festival, 7:30pm in the sidebar competition. It’s comparable to Un Certain Regard or Director’s Fortnight. Every movie I saw in that section was fun, brilliant movies from around the world. The main competition was like Aza Jacobs and Mia Hansen-Løve, people who have been around. And I was like, “This is crazy. What am I doing inside the bloodstream of this establishment? I’m 27. I don’t belong here.” Every person I talked to there couldn’t believe what the movie cost, and then couldn’t believe when I told them what other American movies cost. We were the cheapest movie there by 65%. The next cheapest movie cost I think three times as much as we did. And they were just like, “You can’t make movies for what you’re telling us your movie cost.” And I told them, “Well, I can, I’m here, I’m in the same section as you are, so you are wrong. People think I’m lying when I tell them my budget. And also everyone likes it. I’m having a great time and people are being very responsive. Maurice Pialat’s widow was like, “I heard your movie’s good, I want a copy of it.” I’m like, “Well this is f**kin’ crazy.” Pedro Costa saw it there and really liked it and I’m like, What am I doing? I had gone in two months from screening at BAM for a lot of friends to Pedro Costa? This is the exact sentence: “Pedro Costa saw your movie. He’s a huge Jerry Lewis fan. He wants to talk to you about your movie and also Jerry Lewis.” And I thought, “I’m out of my element. I cannot have that conversation because that’s ridiculous.” Because his retrospective was happening at Anthology when I worked at Kim’s, and his Criterion box set came out when I was working at Kim’s. He can’t want to talk to me. That’s not possible. That’s not allowed. There is no world where that makes any sense!”  Or like when you wrote me to say that David Gordon Green wrote you to say, “I’m watching The Color Wheel and then I’m going to see Tree of Life.” There is no world where this is allowed! Again, somebody whose DVDs I was putting on the shelf, as, like, a hero. And it’s just like, “Oh, I’ll watch this movie.” There’s just a very fuzzy area in the middle there and it happened very quickly and I don’t understand why.  I still have a voice-mail from Sean [Price Williams, cinematographer]. I wish he was here to talk about it, but the voice-mail is a long pause and he’s just like, “I don’t want to tell you this, because it’s gonna make you so insufferable. I hate having to tell you this, but Leos Carax watched your movie and he really loves it, and he wants to meet you when he comes to New York.” I can’t live in a world where Leos Carax knows who I am, watches my movie, likes it, and thinks, “I wanna meet that guy.”
~ It’s Alex Ross Perry’s World

“I don’t know. It’s been a lot harder than I thought it was going to be to make the films I really dream of making. I was in Italy a few years ago scouting for this very beautiful film I wanted to make with Richard Linklater. We worked really hard on the script for a couple of years and couldn’t get the money together. It was an expensive idea. It’s heartbreaking when that happens over and over again and then the movies that do get made are ones that have lots of women being beaten up or zombies being killed. It’s all fine, it’s all okay, but it’s hard. I remember when River Phoenix died, he was ahead of me on this curve. He kind of realized how hard it was to make serious movies. People like Sidney Lumet figured out how to walk that line, but it’s hard. And it requires patience. It’s a life’s work and I wonder if I’m up to the task.”
~ Weary, Wary Ethan Hawke

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