$35 a Ticket? Really?

The following article appeared in Daily Variety today. Now, I love going to the movies. More often that not, I will pay $10, $11, $12 for a ticket rather than wait for DVD because I like the experience of being in a theater. I love being enveloped by darkness, and I like splurging on teeth-rotting fountain soda (although I've switched to Diet Coke from regular). I like seeing something ahead of the crowd. Most of all, I simply cannot focus on films as well at home. In recent weeks, I've watched the Kate Beckinsale version of Emma, The Bridge on the River Kwai and My Darling Clementine on DVD. They're all classics. I couldn't tell you what any of them were about.

However, this plan from Village Roadshow is lunacy. Sheer lunacy. Among other things, I just sneak my sushi meals in, and I'd probably do the same with mini bottles of wine (if I drank wine). Ooh, should I have said that? Will I be carted off to jail now?

How do the rest of you feel? P.S. I'm surprised the initial rollout doesn't include New York or Los Angeles.

FROM VARIETY: A recession may be looming, but a group of investors thinks Americans are ready to pony up $35 for a movie ticket.

Village Roadshow Ltd., Act III, Lambert Entertainment and the Retirement Systems of Alabama pension fund have partnered to bring the luxury cinema circuit Village Roadshow Gold Class Cinemas to the U.S.

The partners will spend $200 million to build 50 theaters nationwide over the next five years, with the first two venues set to open in South Barrington, a suburb of Chicago, and the Seattle suburb of Redmond in October. Others are planned for Fairview, Texas, near Dallas-Fort Worth, and Scottsdale, Ariz.

Each complex will sport theaters featuring 40 reclining armchair seats with footrests, digital projection and the capability to screen 2-D and 3-D movies, as well as a lounge and bar serving cocktails and appetizers, a concierge service and valet parking.

But the circuit will especially push its culinary offerings -- made-to-order meals like sushi and other theater-friendly foods from on-site chefs (a service button at each seat calls a waiter).
Moviegoers will have to pay extra for any food they order, however.

The Burbank-based company's hoping to attract 10 million "upscale and affluent" consumers per year to its theaters that will be housed in high-end shopping centers and malls. Each complex will typically house eight screens.

"It's a new way to go to the movies," said Graham Burke, managing director and CEO of Village Roadshow Ltd. "It's like what Mercedes is to a Toyota or like flying first class in an airplane."
Village Roadshow founded the Gold Class Cinemas chain in Australia in 1997. It has since expanded to other countries, including Singapore and Greece.

Company execs said bringing the chain to the U.S. is a "natural extension" of the brand.

"The demand for luxury moviegoing in the U.S. is very strong, and by working with our partners, we are delivering on that demand in a way never before experienced by the American consumer," said Kirk Senior, CEO of Village Roadshow Gold Class Cinemas.

In addition to its initial complexes in Illinois, Washington, Texas and Arizona, company also plans to build in California, Florida, Nevada, Pennsylvania and New York.

Gold Class Cinemas won't be the first luxury theater circuit in the U.S. Regal Entertainment, Cinemark, National Amusements and Sundance Cinemas offer similar services, including high-end food and concierges, at much cheaper prices of around $12-$18 per ticket.

Idea is that plushing up the current moviegoing experience will encourage auds that typically stay home to watch movies via their pricey home theaters to venture out again. But it's also a way for exhibs to make more money: Concession sales are kept by theater chains, while a little more than half of each ticket sold is split with the studios. Selling sushi and a glass of wine will command higher prices than popcorn and soda.

There are an estimated 300 high-end multiplexes operating in the U.S.

If the recession is stressing out some businesses, exhibitors aren't sweating just yet.

Entertainment has long been shown to be recession-proof. And that's exactly the attitude Village Roadshow is taking.

"This is a top-end experience," Burke said. "People want to get away from their blues. I don't think the recession will affect it one iota."

A Tale of Two Cities

Boston vs. New York. Red Sox vs. Yankees. New England clam chowder vs. Manhattan. Patriots vs. Giants. (Well, that one should be Foxboro, Mass., vs. E. Rutherford, N.J.) The two cities - my birth city and my sort-of-adopted one - have been rivals in just about everything for years. In 1972, New York-born filmmaker Sidney Lumet made Serpico, which garnered Al Pacino a nomination for Best Actor. The movie, based on Peter Maas' nonfiction book, was very much a product of New York City. Ten years later, Lumet directed Paul Newman to his own Best Actor nomination in The Verdict. It too was based on a book - here, a novel by Barry Reed - but it was set in my hometown. How did Lumet do at capturing Beantown and Gotham?


When Sidney Lumet directed the 1972 police-corruption saga Serpico, he said he wanted "truth of locations,” and he finds this truth masterfully. The native son easily captures the feelings of an immigrant’s child, the old-school shoe store and the open fire hydrants of Little Italy butting against Frank Serpico’s (Al Pacino) desire to move to Greenwich Village, study at NYU and become a police officer. Lumet doesn’t harp on the family angle as Pacino’s character becomes increasingly embroiled in the morally ambiguous cop world, but he still makes Serpico a true city film. He shoots in four of the five boroughs, everywhere from Coney Island and Williamsburg to a park by a pre-renovation Yankee Stadium. Serpico’s speciality is his ability to be of the people, and Pacino’s clothing and beard so achieve this that watching the movie is like watching a documentary about Village counterculture in the 1960s.

Whether it’s because the source material (a predictable novel by Barry Reed) wasn’t as dynamic or Lumet wasn’t as familiar with the city, the feeling of place suffered 10 years later when he directed the Boston legal drama The Verdict. Lumet uses accents, ruddy-complexioned old-school alcoholics and Irish names aplenty as his main setting markers. As a native Bostonian, I swear, not everyone from Southie and Dorchester has an accent or roots in Dublin. Fortunately, the speech isn’t of a Rob Morrow-in-Quiz-Show atrocity, but it would have been nice to hear some working-class people talk in “normal” voices. It’s not that a New Yorker can’t work in Boston: Martin Scorsese made The Departed feel like The Whitey Bulger Story, even though the film’s roots were in fact a Hong Kong flick. But were it not for occasional pans of triple deckers on hilly streets, The Verdict could have been set in Toronto.

Family matters

I saw The Savages a month ago, but I hadn't had time to write a review until I was forced to work for five useless hours today. The movie brought forth a lot of memories surrounding my grandfather's death last year.

Here's what usually happens when Hollywood makes a film about generational strain.

Dad is a doddering fool prone to inappropriate comments. Manic siblings fight with each other and their father. People scream about past injustices. The offended parties apologize and hug just before Dad shuffles off to that mortal coil. "The Wind Beneath My Wings" plays at the funeral. Everyone sniffles.

Thankfully, The Savages avoids the pablum. Instead, writer/director Tamara Jenkins honestly examines that stage of life when middle-aged children must care for their parents. (Jenkins also showed a gift for capturing familial nuances in her debut feature, The Slums of Beverly Hills.) The Savages is darkly funny, superbly acted and uncomfortably real.

Ideally cast Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman are the stunted Savage siblings, adrift Manhattanite Wendy and Buffalo-based Brecht-loving academic Jon. When their father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), starts descending into dementia, Wendy and Jon cannot decide if it's an alarm or a crisis. "We're in orange," she says. To Jon, they're only in yellow - no need to worry until code red. In the next scene, as she's having her nails painted red, Lenny's girlfriend dies.

Wendy takes neurotic to new levels. Stealing painkillers from the dead, an act that leaves Jon aghast, is the least of it. She also sleeps with a married man, exaggerates medical conditions and isn't exactly honest about a writing grant. (The disclosure of the grant's source is one of the most hilarious in The Savages.)

She's also heartbreaking in her attempts to do right by a man who rarely was there for her. Wendy tries - oh, how she tries - to locate a proper nursing-home setting. She's the one who goes through her father's belongings in Arizona, where she finds random school photos and childhood artwork. Jenkins and Linney play the scene perfectly: no music, no overly long chatter, just a surprised, moved smile when Wendy realizes she mattered to her father.

Jon seems more put together than his melodramatic sister - but is it maturity or lack of emotion? He doesn't let details bog him down, simply bringing their father to Buffalo and finding a nursing home right away.

Jon is in a disheveled state, though. His house is a mess, he can't commit to his girlfriend, he can't finish his book, and he looks like an uncomfortable schlub. Hoffman gives us glimpses of Jon's buried feelings, notably when the departing girlfriend cooks for him, but mostly Jon's as stuck as his sister.

The Savages wouldn't work without Bosco's nuanced, complex Lenny. The character seems easy to hate, estranged from his children and dismissive of the minority health-care workers who assist him. Yet it's impossible not to feel sadness as Lenny struggles with his slipping acuity. He doesn't know what state he's in; he can't even distinguish between a hospital and a hotel.

The Savages ends tentatively, with small changes but no grand statements about family ties. It's sad, it's funny - it's life.

Live For a Few Hours? Sure. A Day? Hmmm ...

When my sister-in-law saw the commercial for Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, she wondered who would want to see such a movie. "Ooh, I would," I replied. It's totally my kind of experience: Saturday afternoon, Upper East Side, with all the old ladies. Ultimately, my viewing took place on a Thursday afternoon in Midtown with about six middle-aged women. Even without the ideal audience, I still think I would be ambivalent about this flick.

Guinevere Pettigrew and Delysia Lafosse populate a London of fashion shows and cocktail parties in the fizzy Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. The city is also on the cusp of World War II, but director Bharat Nalluri and screenwriters David Magee and Simon Beaufoy graft the gas masks onto to the decadence with a great deal less success.

Through a lie and a bit of luck, hard-scrabble governess Miss Pettigrew (Emma Thompson-esque Frances McDormand) enters the world of madcap entertainer Delysia (Amy Adams, whose doe-eyed shtick is beginning to wear thin after Junebug and Enchanted) as her social secretary. Despite having no obvious skills for the job, Pettigrew quickly earns Delysia’s admiration by helping her to balance the three men in her life and figure out her career path. In turn, Delysia rewards Pettigrew with affection and the obligatory makeover.

This all sounds like fun, light comedy, but in fact the threat of war becomes more prominent as Miss Pettigrew progresses, and Nalluri can’t balance the frivolity and the fear. Most of the battle chatter is scored with swing music that feels forced and out of place. At one point, it’s implied Delysia is singing at night during an air-raid alarm, yet oranges and purples dominate the sky. Was Nalluri afraid to make the palate too dark? And Pettigrew’s tentative, war-tinged romance with an older lingerie designer (Ciaran Hinds), while poignant, seems to belong in another movie.

Ultimately, Miss Pettigrew is a sparkling Champagne cocktail gone flat.

Boleyn Girls Gone Bad

My friend Michelle, who has read the book, warned me the movie version was awful. However, I tried to remember teacher Josh's comments about separating source material from film. That was impossible here.

Every year, the Golden Raspberry Awards “honor” the least-laudable cinematic efforts of the prior year. I’d like to propose a new category for 2008, Worst Adapted Screenplay, and I already have a nominee: Peter Morgan for The Other Boleyn Girl.

Granted, the source material, Philippa Gregory’s 672-page glorified Harlequin, isn’t exactly The English Patient. However, Morgan, who previously did deft work on The Last King of Scotland and The Queen, so modifies, truncates and condenses the story that it bares almost no resemblance to the breezy page-turner.

To wit: The title’s operative word is “other.” The novel is about Mary (a milquetoast Scarlett Johansson), not Anne (Natalie Portman, whose voice lacks the maturity needed to convey madness or ambition), yet the alleged title character disappears for large stretches of the film. Instead, Morgan and director Justin Chadwick parade through relationships, pregnancies and miscarriages that didn’t occur as written and make up scenes in the courtship of King Henry (a too-young Eric Bana) and Anne.

As in soap-opera writing style, Morgan does take time to make sure the audience knows Anne and Mary are related: The word “sister” is uttered literally 25 times, including three times in one sentence. If only Morgan had developed intelligent storylines rather than repeating expressions.

The Other Boleyn Girl didn’t need to be Harvey Weinstein-style Oscar bait, but it could have been decadent fun. Instead, it’s just as ridiculous as its ponderous costumes (which, by the way, look as cheap as a 1970s shag carpet).

What you remember 20 years later

When I was about 10, my mother and aunt introduced me to Agatha Christie, and the first book my mother told me to read was Murder on the Orient Express. I figured out "whodunit" about five chapters in. (Sadly, I've never been that good at mysteries since.) I watched the movie a year or so later, and I remember liking it. Therefore, when my film class decided to expand beyond current releases last month, I suggested Orient Express, which was showing at Film Forum as part of the Sidney Lumet film festival. Ironically, I was sick that night and had to wait until this past weekend to see it. (Darn Blockbuster!) Does the movie work years later?

Sidney Lumet’s 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express represents a throwback to the days of MGM spectaculars. Glamour is what Lumet said he aimed for, and with the lush score, opulent costumes, and brand-name cast - Sean Connery! Lauren Bacall! Ingrid Bergman! - glamour is what he gave. More than 30 years later, though, the production resembles an overstuffed floral-print couch, a rich relic that hasn’t aged well.

The problem isn’t the script. Paul Dehn stays pretty faithful to Christie’s text, and the author reportedly called this version of Orient Express her favorite adaptation of her work. The Academy Award-nominated screenplay contains pithy remarks aplenty. “Does he speak English?” the great detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney, unrecognizable under deliberately aging makeup) asks of a suspect. “I think he speaks a kind of English, sir,” Beddoes (John Gielgud) replies. “He learned it in a place called Chicago.”

Of course, the delivery of the lines is as crucial as the dialogue itself. “My doc-tor has advised against it,” Wendy Hiller’s Princess Dragomiroff snootily explains to Poirot when he notes she never smiles. Finney takes pleasure in dragging out “ooh” sounds in Poirot’s Belgian-accented English - although his Oscar-nominated performance can border on hammy. Even without words, the actors convey emotions from shiftiness (Anthony Perkins, playing to Psycho type) to disdain, particularly when the grand American actress Harriet Hubbard (Bacall) chews gum during her interrogation.

A nice casting touch: Martin Balsam, as one of the good guys. He starred in another train drama in 1974, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, but there he played a subway hijacker.

Lumet said he wanted Orient Express to end with a “curtain call,” as it would in a theater. That ultimately may be the issue with the film: It looks and feels like a big theatrical production. It doesn’t open up.

Some staginess is unavoidable. Poirot delivers his explanation behind the murder of Mr. Ratchett (Richard Widmark) in a cramped train car, precluding much directorial creativity. On the other hand, the railroad shed in Paris where the boarding scenes were shot comes across as a generic soundstage. The ladies’ wardrobes, one more stunning than the next (excluding Bergman’s missionary), should have a “can you top this attitude” - but the women act as if they’re walking onto a stage, not an elegant train. Richard Rodney Bennett’s jaunty, waltz-heavy score has that unfortunate 1970s stereophonic quality. It also plays as a transition between scenes rather than as a complement to the storyline.

Lumet’s pre-1974 work included the serious Serpico and Fail-Safe; Orient Express was a deliberate attempt to lighten up. In seeking to be sweepingly classy and glamorous, though, Lumet forgets the simple fizzy fun of a murder mystery. From the Art Deco opening credits - imposed on red velvet curtains, no less - to the panoply of accents, Orient Express tries to be Champagne when white wine would be just perfect.

Be kind: Pick a mood!

My film class saw Be Kind Rewind on Tuesday. When I'm looking at it just for kicks, it's OK. When I sat down to write a review, I found myself more critical. I also remembered a movie I watched last year filmed in Bayonne, N.J., at a mom-and-pop video store. Really? Two flicks of a similar quirky vein in less than 12 months??

Manic comedy. Moviemaking homage. Love letter to community. Be Kind Rewind is all of this, resulting in a frenzied yet meandering film.

Writer/director Michel Gondry specializes in the original; he previously directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Here, he gives us a Passaic, N.J., video/thrift store run by old-time jazz fan Fletcher (Danny Glover), a surrogate father to shy Mike (Mos Def). While Fletcher’s out of town, Mike’s disruptive friend Jerry (an especially antic Jack Black) accidentally erases the tapes – he’s been zapped by the nearby power plant – leading the duo to recreate everything from Ghostbusters to a particular hilarious Rush Hour 2. The customers love it. The government doesn’t.

Be Kind Rewind works best as a valentine to amateur filmmaking. Sure, The Lion King and Robocop “remakes” are funny, but it’s the ingeniousness that produces such enjoyment. Lack tall buildings in the suburbs? Hang from monkey bars in a playground. Need “chop-chop” music? Scratch a record back and forth.

Unfortunately, this cinematic celebration doesn’t occur until 30 minutes into Be Kind Rewind. The lead-up drags, and neither a mumbling Def nor an overly zany Black sustains our interest. When the neighborhood must rally to save the store, we see more clever directing techniques, but sap has overtaken the humor. The last five minutes use music and images, not dialogue, to wrap up the story. It’s like watching an episode of One Tree Hill.

Last year, another quirky, New Jersey-set tale of a dying VHS outlet, Watching the Detectives, made the festival circuit. Be Kind Rewind may have arrived a year later, but its additional doses of eccentricity aren’t enough to ultimately be successful.