Movie Releases • 7/23/04

[DudeAsInCool]

Catwoman or Bourne Supremacy - which one are you gonna check out this weekend? And, even though Im not a Metallica fan, the behind the scenes documentary on the band sounds very interesting; I heard an interview with the filmmakers, who trained with the Maysle Bros, and it almost made me want to go. I've also heard good things about The Clearing. Also, if you didnt catch it the first time around, you should check out Donnie Darko.

NEW

The Bourne Supremacy (Universal) / 3,162 Screens

Catwoman (Warner Bros.) / 3,117

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (IFC) / 42 (+19) / 3

Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut (Newmarket) / 6 (+5) / 8

Leftovers

I, Robot (Fox) / 3,494 (+74) / 2

Napoleon Dynamite (Fox Searchlight) / 389 (+210) / 7

De-Lovely (United Artists) / 333 (+148) / 4

Troy (Warner Bros.) / 301 (+191) / 11

DECLINING

Spider-Man 2 (Sony) / 3,753 (-305) / 4

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (DreamWorks) / 2,936 (-168) / 3

King Arthur (Buena Vista) / 2,104 (-982) / 3

The Notebook (New Line) / 2,003 (-86) / 5

Fahrenheit 9/11 (Lions Gate) / 1,855 (-149) / 5

Shrek 2 (DreamWorks) / 1,559 (-298) / 10

DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story (Fox) / 1,373 (-572) / 6

The Terminal (DreamWorks) / 1,254 (-550) / 6

White Chicks (Sony) / 1,152 (-578) / 5

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Warner Bros.) / 1,008 (-452) / 8

Garfield: The Movie (Fox) / 680 (-348) / 7

The Clearing (Fox Searchlight) / 429 (-20) / 4

Two Brothers (Universal) / 375 (-187) / 5

The Stepford Wives (Paramount) / 256 (-266) / 7

The Chronicles of Riddick (Universal) / 245 (-58) / 7

Mean Girls (Paramount) / 236 (-32) / 13

NASCAR 3D: The IMAX Experience (IMAX) (Warner Bros.) / 52 (-3) / 20

SNEAK PREVIEWS

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (New Line) / 894 sneaks on Fri (opens

7/30)

Indies

Love Me If You Dare (Paramount Classics) / 3 (-5) / 10

Super Size Me (IDP) / 118 (-9) / 12

Before Sunset (Warner Independent Pictures) / 140 (+18) / 4

The Door in the Floor (Focus) / 120 (+73) / 2

Ella Enchanted (Miramax) / 68 (+24) / 16

A Cinderella Story (Warner Bros.) / 2,625 / 2

Maria Full of Grace (Fine Line) / 7 / 2

Zatoichi (Seville) / 4 (LA, NYC) / 4

[MoonMan]

I have no interest in either movie. They both look incredibly stupid.

I saw Anchorman yesterday though, it was alright.

[Kooperman]

This looks like a rental weekend here too...

[DudeAsInCool]

This one looks kind of interesting:

'Harold and Kumar': A Dumb Stoner Comedy for a New American Century

By A.O. SCOTT

Published: July 25, 2004

THE plot of "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," succinctly summarized in the movie's title, consists of an amusing, anarchic grab-bag of road-picture mishaps and low-comedy gags. Many of the comic elements are predictable (dumb stoners doing dumb, stoned things, sexual come-ons and gross-outs of various kinds) while others are less so, like the part when Neil Patrick Harris, playing himself, starts licking the headrests on a Honda.

But a clever bait-and-switch early in the film signals its sly subversive intentions. Its director is Danny Leiner, who made "Dude, Where's My Car?," and he seems at first to pick up more or less where that movie, or any of its illustrious predecessors going back to"Porky's," left off. An ex-frat boy type, with a roomy office in a New York high-rise, is finishing up his work week. His pal, immediately recognizable as the wilder half of a classic buddy-movie pair, shows up proposing a fun-filled weekend of babes, booze and bong hits. But what about that big report due on Monday? No problem: just dump it on the Korean guy in the far cubicle. Our hero is free to pursue the carefree debauchery that is his birthright.

Except, of course, that the pale-skinned frat boy type is not the hero at all. He and his friend (who happen to be played by the screenwriters, Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz) are walk-on doofuses who pretty much walk out of the movie, leaving it in the hands of that unassuming Korean guy, Harold. He turns out to be the more uptight half of a classic buddy-movie pair — the wilder half is his roommate, a South Asian former pre-med named Kumar — intent on claiming their own share of carefree debauchery. In the process, they pretty much revolutionize the slacker-stoner-comedy genre.

Well, perhaps that's a bit grandiose, given that what Harold and Kumar really want to do, after a few Friday night tokes, is satisfy a powerful case of the munchies, an urge that leads them deep into the wilds of New Jersey and lands them in all kinds of trouble. But the movie's apparently simple shifts of racial and generational emphasis — replacing the traditional white (or, in recent variants, black) teenagers or undergraduates with Asian-Americans in their post-college years — at once upend the conventions of youth-oriented goofball comedy and revitalize them. "Harold and Kumar" is as delightfully stupid as "Friday" or "Road Trip" or "Wet Hot American Summer," but it is also one of the few recent comedies that persuasively, and intelligently, engage the social realities of contemporary multicultural America.

Read the full review here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/movies/25SCOT.html

[Potato]

The Korean guy, John Cho, was also in the American Pie movies, The Flintstones in Vegas or whatever that awful movie was, and "Better Luck Tomorrow"... those are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head. He's also the lead in a band called Left of Zed. Freakishly tall Asian people amuse me.

[deb]

:rolleyes:

Edited July 25, 2004 by reg

[Warflower]

"Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle"

That's the best title EVER! :rotfl:

I gotta see this.

[DudeAsInCool]

Here are the summer box office winners and losers so far:

Sleepers & weepers

Sun Jul 25, 5:19 AM ET

Peter Bart, STAFF, Variety

This is the moment of summer when Hollywood takes a breath and tries to elicit some meaning from the weekend-to-weekend box office chaos.

To accomplish this, the shockwaves must first be absorbed.

Yes, an expensive Jerry Bruckheimer summer action movie, "King Arthur," will struggle to get past $50 million domestic, and a Spielberg summer movie, "Terminal," also proved wobbly.

Yes, a teen romp called "Sleepover" actually managed to open badly and still plummet 72% its second week.

And, yes, the Internet geeks weren't genuflecting either over "I, Robot" or "Catwoman" (negative geek-buzz always makes the studios nervous), but the Will Smith movie at least opened big-time at $52.2 million.

The ground was also supposed to be shifting under the sequels business, but "Spidey 2" still managed to levitate itself into outer space.

It was a summer of surprises for sleepers as well as tentpoles.

"Dodgeball," a dopey guy flick whose script had knocked around for quite a while, shot past $100 million.

"Mean Girls," meanwhile, was not only encroaching on $85 million in the U.S., but is also defying the rules of chick flicks by rolling up impressive numbers overseas.

"The Notebook" continued to build strong word of mouth in that most rarified category -- a quality tear-jerker. And "Fahrenheit 9/11," the movie no distributor wanted, became the highest grossing documentary of all time.

Hence, the sleeper list refuted tidy generalizations -- much to the frustration of studios eager to find a new success formula.

Some movies did play true to form.

The "Harry Potter (news - web sites)" franchise continued to be bountiful, and Warner Bros. did itself proud by gambling on an outside candidate, Alfonso Cuaron, to shepherd it.

"Shrek 2" seemed gold-plated from its moment of inception -- it's already glided past $700 million worldwide. Almost every studio bid for "Day After Tomorrow," and it's passed $527 million globally.

Some wannabe tentpoles, however, needed a major jolt from the overseas audience to achieve their expectations.

"Van Helsing" grossed $120 million in the U.S., but gleaned another $150 million abroad. "Troy" did a respectable $132 million domestic, but its foreign afterburners generated an astonishing $350 million.

The overseas audience, however, did not rally behind "Around the World in 80 Days" (U.S. gross: $23 million) or "The Alamo" (U.S.: $22 million).

And while Buena Vista had hopes for "King Arthur" overseas, its limp performance in the U.S. will surely inhibit its impact ("King Arthur" did not employ the macho day-and-date worldwide opening pursued by "Shrek 2" or "Troy").

While the jury's still out on a few important movies (the still-to-come "Collateral," "The Village" and "Manchurian Candidate" and the just opened "Bourne Supremacy" and "Catwoman"), some tentative conclusions about summer '04 can still be advanced.

Total grosses were up almost 10% over summer '03, but year-to-date numbers climbed only 6.2% and admissions were up slightly. Hence, higher ticket prices, not brilliant product, constituted the key to the lofty grosses.

Indeed, were it not for Mel Gibson (news) and Michael Moore, the year would surely be a major disappointment. The two filmmakers who had the most doors slammed in their faces thus saved Hollywood's butt in 2004.

What "take-away" do studio hierarchs scrape from all this?

A few argue resolutely that, despite the soaring risks, the tentpoles saved the day. A few others cite the sleepers as their saviors.

One CEO put it this way: "I can see why Kirk Kerkorian has decided to pack it in and focus on Las Vegas. At least he's admitting it's all about the big gamble."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...epers___weepers

[moodyblue]

Saw 'Spider Man' yesturday 8/1/04.....it was okay, but for me it dragged in places.

I have seen 'King Arthur' and I thought it was a good movie.....