Box Office: Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Water For Elephants

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Domestic:	$10,095,170	9.7%
+ Foreign:	$94,289,245	90.3%
= Worldwide:	$104,384,415

 

Domestic Summary

Opening Weekend:	$335,502
(#23 rank, 34 theaters, $9,868 average)
% of Total Gross:	3.3%
> View All 44 Weekends

Widest Release:

202 theaters

Close Date:

February 24, 2011

Release Date: March 19, 2010Genre: ThrillerRuntime: 2 hrs. 32 min.MPAA Rating: RProduction Budget: $13 million

Water For Elephants

Domestic:	$57,192,169	50.3%
+ Foreign:	$56,430,306	49.7%
= Worldwide:	$113,622,475

Domestic Summary

Opening Weekend:	$16,842,353
(#3 rank, 2,817 theaters, $5,979 average)
% of Total Gross:	29.4%
> View All 9 Weekends

Widest Release:

2,820 theaters

In Release:

59 days / 8.4 weeks

Release Date: April 22, 2011Genre: DramaRuntime: 2 hrs. 0 min.MPAA Rating: PG-13Production Budget: $38 million

 I put these stats here for comparison. Allowing for the fact that GWTDT has been out 1 year longer than WFE the difference of 25 million in the production budget is significant. We do not know what the promotion costs were for WFE but when you trot trick ponies all around the world for promotion they are considerable. Add that in for all the TV time and trailers for months. Gulp!

GWTDT had none of that and opened at $335,502 and never had more than a total of 202 theaters at any given time, this is impressive. The US Domestic total at 10 mil is low but consider that the film is Swedish, with English subtitles and you have the answer. The American masses are not known for their literacy chops.

So a small limited release art house film is giving the Hollywood WFE a run for its money.

Without getting into an interpretive swamp here, I see an interesting trend emerging. Am I the only one? If you were an actor which way might you decide to go for both esthetic reasons and financial ones, and considering your time and energy selling as a large part of the equation?

Water For Elephants: Reese Witherspoon is Electrifying!

Water for Elephants

Just this past Saturday night I saw the film. There were about five of us getting a private screening in the multiplex.  Reese Witherspoon gave one of the finest performances I've ever seen. I have not been complimentary of her in the past and I apologize for my stupidity in writing about her "new tricks" for this performance before I saw her. The trailers create a different impression but what else is new.

Her Marlena is so finely nuanced that she is a wonder to watch. Face to face with Pattinson her expressions screw up, her mouth tightens into a hard, harsh line, and we can glimpse the embittered woman that is emerging in her present life with August. How brave she is to do this! Not a seductive gaze to be seen as she talks to him across the table before August comes to join them. This is a woman from the working class or lower middle class with no illusions. Aware of the illusion she creates in her performances she thinks she is nothing in real life. She sees into this woman as Sarah Gruen could never have had the creative expertise to write her, as Lawrence the obtuse director could never have guided her, as the clueless screenplay skimmed over. (You're a beautiful woman, you deserve a beautiful life. So if you're ugly you deserve an ugly life? Gimme a break.) Marlena is not only tough, but she sees herself in the present and where she is heading down the line. Jacob's comment about the dry skin of Rosie does not escape her notice. She is not old but no longer young.

"Where were you when I was seventeen?" she says to Jacob. Well Jacob was somewhere in school. But she means that there were no young men around like him then just as there are no young men like Rob Pattinson around now.

The complaints about the sex scene and the lack of high powered chemistry between the two have been moaned over.

Get this straight. Marlena finally loves Jacob, but she does not fall in love with him. And there is the difference. He is fascinated with her, not in love, just absolutely fascinated and accepts the responsibility for this and what has occurred because of it. Inexperienced and innocent his feelings have been the catalyst for the crazed jealousy of August. (Go to Freud's explanation of paranoia for this if you are curious.) The sex scene in the hotel has been criticized for the lack of chemistry also. Lawrence has received not a little of it in that he has had no experience in directing romantic scenes. But Marlena is not a romantic, although she has been seducing him.  Jacob is attractive, educated, wants her, and he is responsible. And she loves him. Who wouldn't. It seems everyone learns to love him so why would she be any different. But so passionate that it has to be a steamy sex scene? No. It's a first time between two people who have not really committed themselves to each other. And one of them is fairly innocent. That the old Jacob has romanticized their relationship is true. But he is old and alone and his children are not very devoted. Jacob tells her he will get his degree, they will go to Ringling, all practical words to convince her of his intentions. When she is dragged away and he is beaten he plods after her. But knife in hand he cannot even kill August for her. Marlena looks at him with her bruised eye with the sleeping August's arms around her  and her look says it all. It's up to you if you want to kill for me. I won't urge you nor will I object. And in the book and film Jacob calls to Rosie in panic as he sees what she is going to do. Fortunately he cannot stop her and Rosie does it for him.

Review

This is not a passion-love/death scenario. These are two people planning a future in the hotel room and as they go off to Ringling. As we see Jacob in his nineties, it is obvious that he has needed mollifying from time to time like August and Marlena knew this. He also maybe drinks just a little bit too much. Their children are not exactly adoring and attentive to him in his old age, and Marlena, while she is affectionate, is not sentimental with her horses, nor probably with her children. Caring yes, but also expecting certain types of behavior from them. Is all this in the book? In the screenplay? Hell no. Gruen could never have imagined it all nor does she have the ability to put it into words.

But Reese does exactly all that. We get a Marlena not on paper between covers, not in the screenplay nor in the flat footed direction. We get it from the experience and courage and intuitive imagination of Reese Witherspoon.

Waltz is very good but his is a watered down Landa from Inglourious Basterds. That he gave up the role of Jung with Cronenberg for this film makes me wonder about his real sanity.

As for Rob Pattinson, Lawrence has used him 99% of the time as eye-candy. And he has been there many times before (The Haunted Airman, Harry Potter). He is completely aware of this. He has the uncanny ability to send his feelings out in vibrations that have nothing to do with the character he is playing. I was anxious halfway through the film, feeling his discomfort. He is in every single scene. His face is very up close and personal in almost every shot. Baudrillard's analysis of the face as pornography says it all. Jacob/Pattinson is beaten up a lot, his face bruised, swollen and bloody. Hollywood used to do this to women a lot until the feminists protested this model for men. Now they use it as a femme sign for Rob Pattinson and since he is a male it is OK. It is NOT OK to use gratuitous sadism/masochism vented on a face to induce sexual stimulation, whether that actor is male or female. It is gratuitous period, like soft porn for no other reason than to sell tickets. And Lawrence has done the same with Rosie only that has backfired on him with real allegations. Reese and Christoph are constantly in the background, and it is as if Lawrence is saying he expects Rob Pattinson to be his ticket to success in the big time world of Hollywood directors. So he has planned all along in seducing Rob with Tai and jumping on the Pattinson bandwagon. Then he trots him out all over the world to make sure the foreign sales are up.

Simply, he is pimping Rob's face. Rob knows this and has no way of objecting. Lawrence does not dare interfere with Reese's interpretation of her role, nor Waltz's, but he controls the way Rob is seen with his camera. And his editing. Emile Hirsch would have been a better choice for the integrity of the film as he would have been expected and allowed to interpret his character instead of be a face. So any criticism of Rob Pattinson is NOT deserved.

I guess I could go on but who wants me to. I don't even want to.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS Review Part 6

Back to violence. Now there is splashy violence and then there is insidious,evil violence. They are two different things. One is subtle, the other is not. Insidious violence occurs in your life every day. Do you see it? Or are you blind and asleep?

An example of terrible violence done to a soul is in the first scene. Waltz knows that his dairy farmer peasant victim has hidden the family of Jews. He knows it in his gut because he connects lots of dots. The way the UC Berkeley officer knew something was wrong with the two children which led to Jaycee's rescue after eighteen years of hell. Now there's a case of both kinds of evil. Her daughters sound autistic. Who will rescue them?

But back to the first scene of IB. Landa knows and he could just simply have his officers rape the farmer's daughters, torture them in front of him until he tells, shoot them all, whatever. But no, he sits down to drink a glass of fresh milk, chat a little over tobacco, and squeeze more fear into his victim. Because the farmer knows he knows but hopes he doesn't. His careful performance is perfection. His eyes get stony with protective cover. He sweats and Christoph Waltz watches with pleasure and he tightens his hold. They speak English, so the Jews underneath won't understand. He reaches a climax where he tells him ever so charmingly that he can take his family in for interrogation or he can just indicate with a nod where they are hiding. The French peasant is known for his astuteness, and this one needs no prodding. He knows what will happen to his young and beautiful daughters. He knows the Jews down below are doomed anyway. Now he is being asked to become a collaborator, to sully his soul, to do such a despicable act that he will forever torture himself afterward. (Think Sophie's Choice.) Now this is violence. He is asking him to be Judas. His reward is not 30 pieces of silver, but the safety of his daughters. He can berate himself the rest of his life by weighing the two alternatives and BTW Corrie Ten Boom had Jews hidden in her house walls and wouldn't tell and she and her family and all the Jews went to a camp. But that's another story.

Waltz is the devil in real life. He is offering a deal to Faust. Sort of. And he has destroyed a human being for the rest of his life.

That is violence, pure and simple. It is the kind of violence you will come up against again and again in your life. Will you recognize it? Will you be able to resist? Will you cave in, compromise, just what will you do? We are seeing this with our charming President Obama. So far he is compromising with insidious evil. He is asleep I think.Will he wake up? Dunno.

Visual violence has already corrupted us. It is too late now to undo the desensitization process. Only when it is someone we love will it cut us to pieces. Willem Dafoe's wife Elizabeth almost threw up watching his death in Platoon.

So one cannot protest violence in a Tarantino film unless one has confronted his depiction of real, total, unrelenting torture and violence of the soul.

The fiery holocaust of the Nazis can be viewed as a template of the JFK assassination, so follow me to Part 8.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS Review Part 4

Here's another one at Huff Po: http://tinyurl.com/md3uda which is better than the others. But still not enough to shut me up. It is again all about violence Tarantino style. Tarantino says violence is like a color, and that's the way he uses it. It is not supposed to frighten and shake you to the core. You are to look at it like a movie, like TV. As he says about 9-11 it didn't affect him. He had seen planes crash into buildings in movies. There is an early Arnold flick where a young boy flying a plane crashes into a high (not a skyscraper) building to commit suicide. This was way before 9-11. Military and domestic intelligence need to use the minds of its imaginative thinkers to predict future attacks. But then there would be so many choices they would get confused. Not Condi Rice, though, the who woulda thought blah blah blah person who was guarding us at the time.

Back to the early sixties with the murder of Kitty Genovese. Genovese was stabbed to death on a public street in 1964 while thirty-eight onlookers watching from their apartments out their windows did nothing to help her. Her assailant took 30 minutes to stalkand stab her to death while she screamed for help. Bibb Latane, a young doctoral student, made his career on his dissertation as to what was going on with those bystanders. Actually they were just precursors to present day onlookers who watch atrocities on TV, in theatres, and on the streets as if they were not real, as if no one is suffering.We have all been desensitized in a behavioral paradigm long long ago. So quit with the ranting about violence. And just slow down for the next roadkill and look.

Back to Blankenship's take on violence. Resevoir Dogs is often brought up here to beat Tarantino over the head. RD shows us just how stupid and boring these aging petty criminals really are. Cocky adolescent delinquents now just low mediocre getting older men who have no imagination as to how to torture or obtain a confession. Just like those peon recruits in Iraq who went to prison for doing what the uppers wanted them to do. Remember the childhood game where you were told to do something bad. If you were clever you knew you would take the blame if caught and the one who instigated it would walk. It's the same fucking game. Cover your ass. Get the jerks to do the dirty work.

So much for blaming Tarantino for gratuitous violence. The theatre scene where the Nazis will get blown up and shot mirrors the film they are watching of the young German soldier killing Americans. The flames that devour the screen and the theatre with their locked doors mirrors the Reichstag fire (German's 9-11) just before Hitler came to power but which was instigated by his stormtroopers. A beautiful parallel with a footnote to Rienzi, the Grand Opera of Wagner where flames engulf all. We know Hitler loved that opera of destruction, the tale of the last Roman Tribune. The locked doors are also the locked doors of the church where Jews were herded and burned I forget where and when but it was a crucial scene in The Reader.

I am not finished with this part yet. Continued in part 5.

Inglourious Basterds Review Part 3

Hello again. I haven't mentioned that Tarantino is the film history student par excellence. The one and only time I heard him on Charlie Rose, many years ago, he took even my breath away with his fingertip knowledge of film. Most of us know he did not finish high school, was raised by a single mom who must have encouraged his curiosity and intelligence. He worked in a video store and saw movies, movies, movies non stop. Well that's the only way you can even approach catching up on film history. And with Tarantino does it ever show. He seems to have seen everything worth seeing and chooses his influences well. Godard for example. A filmmaker's filmmaker, revered all over the world for his risk taking and daring and non-commercial attitude. Still think he's a moron?

Now I am going to try to elucidate his structural analysis. Let's start with the women because they are so beautiful and perfect in this film. Diane Kruger and Melanie Laurent, whose name in the film is Shosanna Dreyfus. The significance of Dreyfus is the Dreyfus Affair. Look it up. Kruger is the German film actress, double agent for M1 in the UK, where Operation Kino (loses me on this but maybe someone will tell me)has been concocted with the Dietrich like Bridget von Hammersmark, a nice play on words again. Kruger is an actress and plays the role as an actress would play it, that is as an as if personality. Laurent is different. She is clearly controlling her feelings lest she betray herself. Her interactions are authentic. We can see her holding in her fear to avoid betraying herself. In her scene with Christoph Waltz his refined brutality is pure evil. He orders her food, a strudel confection with whipped cream on top, he an expresso, her milk. He offers her a cigarette which she accepts. These are chilling details, and they do not escape her. In the first scene before he murders the hiding Jews under the floorboards he shares drink with his victim. He drinks fresh milk and shares tobacco and Shoshanna remembers this, thus her increased fear. Does he know who she is? Does he suspect? Is this an unconscious knowing on his part? Conscious? No, on second viewing he knows. Just before he goes he says, There was something else but I seem to have forgotten it. Oh well. Hans is disciplined to his core. He drinks two glasses of milk in the first scene. But only one expresso with Shosanna. He forces her to wait until the whipped cream is brought to the table, another communication to increase her fear. He does not finish his dessert confection and stubs out his half smoked cigarette in the whipped cream which is filmed close-up. a brutal and uncouth gesture by a cultured man, done for her benefit. A sign that her youth and beauty mean nothing to him.

So now I should tell you this review is a spoiler. I am little interested in plot to keep my attention and focus. I prefer to get it out of the way so I can concentrate on how the film or book is constructed. Feelings that drive one to keep viewing or reading cause you to miss many things;hence, a second viewing is necessary for the films who deserve more attention that one viewing can offer. A Beautiful Life is one such film. Such a deconstruction of authoritarianism and how it relates to fascism is awesome. Another time and posting.

On to part 4? Yes? No?