items tagged with Slumdog Millionaire

127 HOURS

At my first screening of Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours (which I initially caught in Chicagoland over Thanksgiving weekend), I was immediately knocked out by how vibrantly entertaining it was – hardly a fait accompli when a movie climaxes with a bloody act of self-amputation.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE

At roughly the halfway point in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse - the third of four books (and eventually five movies) in author Stephenie Meyer's frighteningly popular series - we're given a flashback that details the vampiristic recruitment of Rosalie (Nikki Reed), a character constricted to the sidelines in previous Twilight installments. Set in what looks to be 1920s or '30s America, the brief sequence finds this pretty blond-turned-bloodsucker exacting revenge on her hateful fiancé while sporting a wedding gown and a nightmarish grin, and it's a total kick; several scenes later, another enjoyable flashback shows us how the similarly undeveloped figure of Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) joined the ranks of the undead while performing a heroic service during the Civil War.

I’ve often pointed out in the Box Office Power Rankings when I’ve thought a movie had a poor release strategy, and in that spirit I have to wonder why Tyler Perry’s movies are still only being released at 2,000 sites. His last five movies have opened in about that many theaters, and their first-weekend grosses have ranged from $17 million to $41 million.

The worst performer among those movies earned nearly $8,400 per theater in its opening weekend, which is just a hair shy of what The Day the Earth Stood Still did in its debut. The new Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail topped $20,000 per theater, better than anything since Milk the last weekend of November and barely eclipsed by Twilight in its first three days. Give Tyler Perry some damned screens!

On the Monday morning following the Oscars, U.S. news Web sites splashed the announcement that the “little film that could,” Slumdog Millionaire, had garnered the Best Picture of 2008 award. Buried on many of the same Web sites was the news that 48 children had been rescued from prostitution and several pimps had been arrested during the previous week in an FBI sting operation. The juxtaposition and implied importance of the two news stories was striking.

Seriously, by the end of Hugh Jackman's opening number during the 2009 Academy Awards telecast, did it even matter if the rest of the show was any good?