Word: oscars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...weekend box-office results were like the prizes a school gives to all sports competitors: everyone's a winner! The one exception was Nine, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a film director at a crisis in his life and career, and five Oscar-laden actresses dressing up this musical version of Federico Fellini's 8½. The picture earned $5.5 million in 1,412 theaters - a slow start for a film meant to give the ailing Weinstein Company a life-saving box-office boost. Movies about movies are rarely big hits (audiences want to eat the sausage...
...numbers are duds, like Hudson's attempt (in a new number, "Cinema Italiano") to channel Madonna in her "Vogue" period. But each one is there to explain a situation, not advance the plot; they're ornamental, not organic. After a while, Nine plays like some Hollywood charity revue where Oscar-winning stars (the movie has six: Day-Lewis, Cotillard, Dench, Kidman, Cruz and Loren) prove that, hey, they can sing...
Javier Bardem, the Spanish hunk who won an Oscar as the killer in No Country for Old Men, was originally to play Guido. When he dropped out, the role went to Day-Lewis, an actor nearly the opposite of Bardem. He's coiled, wary, and has a spirit that's not even slightly Mediterranean. In 8-1/2, Mastroianni was such a natural charmer - so, we have to say, Italian - that he made indolence attractive; in that film, a perpetual sexual adolescence was not a flaw but a goal (especially because women kept throwing themselves at him, and what woman...
...rest of the top 10, all the holdover movies slipped from a third to a half of their last-weekend take (The Blind Side holding the sturdiest), except for the Oscar favorite Up in the Air, which soared 30% by adding 103 venues to last week's 72; it amassed nearly as much per screen as Avatar, and at relative bargain-basement prices. One new romantic comedy in wide release was meant to lure a more mature demographic than Avatar, but attracted almost nobody. Did You Hear About the Morgans?, with Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant as a married...
...films with eyes for Oscar, or laden with critics awards the past week, Nine, A Single Man, The Young Victoria, Crazy Heart and The Lovely Bones all did moderate business in a handful of theaters. Fantastic Mr. Fox, the stop-motion animated feature that picked up awards this past week from the New York and L.A. film critics' groups, actually dropped 57% in ticket sales; the power of the press continues to be impotent. The critics' darlings, if they're to gain traction at all, must wait for the free publicity they may receive from next month's Golden Globe...