It’s a slow box-office weekend and presumably one of last week’s winners like “Four Christmases” or “Bolt” will reign supreme. Even “Twilght” should probably do better than this week’s two big openers, “Cadillac Records” and “Frost/Nixon,” but maybe we’re underestimating the Beyonce, music-loving crowd? Somehow we doubt it.
To be fair, “Frost/Nixon”s release is a limited one, so there’s no way its toppling anyone. Critics seemed to love this one and it has a 90% Rotten Tomatoes Rating. Between the two “thought” reviews I wrote and the one that David Benjamin wrote, we think we’d probably give it around a B or B+ grade. It’s a solid film, but it’s also not anywhere near amazing. That said, the broken record says: weak year, its possibly a Best Picture nominee (frankly, we’d personally give the nod to “The Dark Knight” before we gave it to ‘Nixon’). It’s probably Ron Howard’s best work or at least up there with his best, but its still not as potent as one hoped and Frank Langella who is usually excellent is just good. So in short: a solid piece of work, but you’re probably not going to be blown away. We weren’t.
“Cadillac Records” has a 66% RT rating and we could barely muster the energy to write a proper review and instead wrote our thoughts in relate-pieces about the film. It’s not terrible by any means and Beyonce Knowles is surprisingly good, almost great in it, the performances are… fine, but overall it’s forgettable, cliche-ridden and suffering from condensed, Cliff Notes-history corniness and goofiness.
Coming out in limited release is renowned English video artist Steve McQueen’s lyrical and harrowing, feature-film debut, “Hunger” about the IRA hunger strike instigated by Bobby Sands in North Ireland. The film boasts a pretty grueling and hard-to watch performance by Michael Fassbender. No one’s really talked about how much weight he had to lose for the role (as is generally the case with films like these), but his emaciated look suggest it was a lot. It’s a visceral film and gut-wrenching at times, but also quite poetic and haunting. We thought it was a remarkable piece of work.
The film about family dysfunctions, “Nobel Son” comes out this weekend. We didn’t see it and don’t have much interest frankly. It’s bleak 24% RT rating doesn’t really help us change our minds.
Actually, “Punisher War Zone” could do ok at the box-office, right? It’s a bit impossible for us to judge as the ridiculous-looking film has been completely off our radar and it has a shit-house RT rating of 16%. “Black Balloon” has an incredible 94% rating, but honestly we know very little about it other than it stars Toni Collette in what sounds like a supporting role (but because she’s one of the bigger names, her face is larger on the poster).
“Extreme Movie” comes out this weekend. Umm, yeah…, no. We won’t pretend that we know anything else about the smaller release this weekend, but they’re all here for you to explore should you be feeling adventurous.
