Word: shuttered
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Expensive movies from notable directors usually open toward the end of the year, for timely attention in the Oscar season. Martin Scorsese's last three features - Gangs of New York, The Aviator and The Departed, all starring Leonardo DiCaprio - all followed that rule. The latest Scorsese-DiCaprio pairing, Shutter Island, was originally to come out last October, in plenty of time to beat the Academy drum. When the film's distributor, Paramount, abruptly switched the release date to February 2010, the move was taken as an admission that the movie lacked either Oscar gravitas or box-office clout. In vain...
...Instead, Shutter Island killed, and the Paramount brass looks like a winning brain trust. According to studio estimates, the movie will have earned $40.2 million in its first three days. That's the biggest debut weekend for any Scorsese picture (The Departed was his previous top opener), and any DiCaprio (yes, including Titanic). Turns out the R-rated whodunit - with Leo playing a U.S. marshal searching for a killer in an insane asylum - benefited from an effective ad spot on the Super Bowl and a week with no other new films in wide release. Scorsese's very limited competition came...
...Shutter Island's success was bad news for last weekend's top three films. Valentine's Day lost 70% of last week's audience, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief 51% and The Wolfman, an expensive flop, 69%. Percy Jackson could be the only film of the trio that isn't a one-week wonder. Of the returning films in the weekend's top 15, the one with the most modest drop, 26%, was Dwayne Johnson's kid comedy Tooth Fairy, which shows how little staying power the other movies have...
...main focuses of the Berlin Film Festival, which runs through Feb. 21, is always the celebrities who've jetted into the frosty German capital for the festivities. Leonardo diCaprio, the star of Martin Scorsese's psychological thriller, Shutter Island, was the talk of town after being spotted at the Grill Royal, one of Berlin's top restaurants. Ewan McGregor hit the red carpet to plug his new film, The Ghost Writer, and Renée Zellweger is sitting on the festival jury. Director Roman Polanski was conspicuous by his absence. (He's still under house arrest in Switzerland on rape...
...plot of the book and the film is also weirdly similar to that of this weekend's other new film, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, which has a stranger visiting a rainswept island near Boston after someone's mysterious disappearance and trying to unravel a conspiracy that may threaten his life. That picture - with a gallery of unreliable characters weaving a web of lies around the baffled hero, who must discover the perpetrator by searching for clues in hidden notes - has been widely compared to Hitchcock and film noir; but it might also be Scorsese's tribute to Polanski...