Good Monday Morning, Everyone.
A new movie (“Contraband“) and an old favorite with a new coat of paint (“Beauty & the Beast 3D“) ruled the box office roost in a Top 10 filled with some serious Oscar bait.
Courtesy of Box Office Mojo, here’s the weekend, by the numbers:
1. Contraband $24,100,000
2. Beauty and the Beast (3D) $18,490,000
3. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol $11,500,000
4. Joyful Noise $11,345,000
5. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows $8,410,000
6. The Devil Inside $7,900,000
7. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo $6,800,000
8. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked $5,800,000
9. War Horse $5,607,000
10. The Iron Lady $5,386,000
Meanwhile, the New York Times takes a closer look at “Crazy Horse,” director Frederick Wiseman’s documentary about a Parisian strip club of the same name. It’s his 39th film and closes out a trilogy focusing on the City of Light.
Here’s the nut graf:
“What I am doing,” he said, “is showing many aspects of human behavior, which makes anything that interests me a possible subject.”
“I thought that the effort required,” he continued, “to create erotic fantasies is interesting.” Oh that. In which case Mr. Wiseman is rather late to documenting the gaming of desire. But in “Crazy Horse” he has devoted an entire film to the question of how sexual yearning is translated into a three-dimensional show. Not easily is the short answer. “Crazy Horse” asks the eternal question: Does one really want to see the naked woman behind the nude one?
“I always wanted to do a movie about a nightclub,” Mr. Wiseman said. “So I went with a friend to the Moulin Rouge, and I fell asleep after five minutes, literally put my head down on the table — boom. That was the end of the Moulin Rouge. Then we went to Crazy Horse,” where, apparently, he stayed awake.
Read the full story here.
The Cineaste's Lament. 