The name of the winning bidder was not disclosed. But among the losers was cheesetastic magician David Copperfield, the online news site notes. Sotheby’s failed to sell the award at auction in 2007.
The statue – the only one Welles ever won — was originally owned by Beatrice Welles, the director’s daughter. The bidding took place in Los Angeles and bids were received over the phone and online, The Wrap reports.
“Several familiar faces return to Hobbiton and beyond with Cate Blanchett, Elijah Wood, Hugo Weaving, Ian McKellen, Christopher Lee, Andy Serkis and Ian Holm being joined by newcomers Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt, Evangeline Lilly, Luke Evans and Benedict Cumberbatch.”
Writing in The Guardian this morning, film critic Phil Hoad says Hollywood should take note of the new David Fincher-directed remake of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”
With the film industry set to finish the year about $1 billion off in box office receipts from 2010, mostly on the back of uninspired remakes or endless superhero fare, Hoad says Fincher’s movie succeeds because it offers a new take on an old film, while maintaining the original, intelligent spirit of the original.
Here’s the nut graf:
“Fincher, with a $100m budget, is at this table too. But his Dragon Tattoo, spritzed with its light fragrance of Scandinavian malaise, is clearly a step towards a new kind of remake for the era of international box office. Audiences are better travelled than they used to be and more ready to sample culture in a foreign-language. Where remakes come into being, maintaining the essence of the original work is becoming a plus point – like with the British adaptation of Wallander. The US Dragon Tattoo also follows in the footsteps of Columbia’s remake of J-horror The Grudge – which also kept its predecessors’ Japan setting. It was more elegant, though, in explaining the transition to English-speaking characters: they actually are English speakers (Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character is a care nurse who takes a job in Tokyo at the hexed house of the three previous Japanese movies).
So foreignness can be a selling point for a remake now. Fincher safeguards the Swedishness with what is essentially a form of posh dubbing – substituting actors instead of a new audio track. But his method surely has its limits. It’s hard to imagine it working outside of a western setting: anything set in Asia or Africa would seem ridiculous, or even a bit colonial. And it hides what is, in many ways, still a traditional remake. The black-lacquered title sequence announces the new ownership, and the ascension of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy to global media-brand status. Of course this could only be permitted to happen in Hollywood hands: this is Scandinavian crime fiction as 007 extravaganza. It’s gone respectable, in other words, and on one crucial point it pushes even further in making sure that the star of the show is palatable to her new public: Lisbeth Salander actually asks permission from Mikael Blomkvist to kill with the serial killer, and she doesn’t even get to deal the mortal blow. She is no longer Noomi Rapace’s feminist avenging angel (though Fincher’s version is truer to the book on this point than its Swedish adaptation).”
Good Morning, Everyone.
It’s time for Film Bits, my periodic sampling of the best in movie writing from around the WordPress universe. I’ve picked up some new friends and followers in the last couple of weeks, so I’m particularly eager to highlight their work.
Like me, Vintage Glam Gods also believes that Lindsay Lohan should stop trying to rip off Marilyn Monroe’s shtick. She’s purty and all … but it’s time to blaze a new trail, Miz Lohan.
Did I happen to mention that I’m married to an incredibly beautiful and talented knitter? You’ll find her blog right here.
Hero Complex checks in with “Tintin” masterminds Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson.
Actress Scarlett Johansson tells TotalFilm that she hates the cutesy shortening of her name.
She has a point. Read on:
“It’s laziness,” she told USA Today. “People can’t actually say the whole name? It’s just bizarre… If I hear somebody say that, I know I don’t know them at all.”
Traditionally, it has only been younger Hollywood starlets who’ve had their first and second names hyphened together, and Johansson goes on to query why “serious actors” don’t come in for the same treatment.
“So Cate Blanchett is not, like, ‘Ca-Bla’?” she queried. “Why is that? Why do I have to get stuck with a mangled moniker?” She went on to suggest Da-Day for Daniel Day-Lewis, which we must confess, we rather like.
There’s been some pretty unrelenting hype for “The Dark Knight Rises” of late.
But a new German-language trailer for director Joss Whedon’s superteam-flick should whet the appetites of Marvel fans who might be feeling unjustly overlooked these days.
Here’s the trailer, which looks a lot like the English-only screener released earlier this year. But there’s enough new that it should keep the fanboys and girls happy for a while.
Actor Jeremy Renner, who plays the archer “Hawkeye” in next summer’s “The Avengers” sat down for an interview recently with an Australian newspaper to talk about his career and his star turn in director Joss Whedon’s superhero team flick. He stars this month opposite Tom Cruise in “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.”
Among the highlights:
Q: Can you get a bit lost on a big blockbuster? A:” It certainly had that feeling on The Avengers. Maybe I’m in the movie, maybe I’m not, I have no idea. The scale is out of this world. That’s where I felt like a token, a little pawn chess piece.”
Q: How did you measure up to Cruise in the action stakes? A: “I’ve said it a few times, but I really believe it: Tom Cruise has 48 hours in a day, when we have 24. He may sleep … every once in a while. Literally, he’ll be up two hours before work, training, then put on the producer hat and make sure everyone’s happy, then go home and be a dad for a minute, then he watches movies! How in the world? I went home and I passed out!”
Q: Did you see this action hero niche coming your way? A: No. It started off with wanting to do something on a world stage – The Avengers. I love what Marvel do in that universe, so I thought, ‘I could give that a go, why not?’ I’ve never been a part of a movie people are gonna go see all around the world. I’ve done a lot of movies nobody’s ever seen (laughs). So that opened it up – then Mission came around, then Hansel and Gretel, then Bourne. It all snowballed in a wonderful way.
Because they had nowhere to go but up, box office receipts improved 64 percent over last weekend. But before you start breaking out the party hats, the “Sherlock Holmes” sequel starring Robert Downey Jr. and the new entry in the “Chipmunks” franchise each had soft openings. With just a few weeks left in 2011, Hollywood is set to have a worse year than it did in 2010.
Writing in the pages of Mediaite over the weekend, Philip Bump suggests there’s a pretty simple explanation for why box office receipts are on pace to be $1 billion lower than they were last year: with a constant stream of reboots and retreads, this year’s crop of movies just wasn’t all that good.
But he also suggests that filmgoers got the movies they deserved. The ones that performed best, he notes, happened to score worst on The Rotten Tomatoes ratings scale.
Here’s the nut graf:
“The only period during which 2011 was doing better was in the late summer – and that’s almost entirely due to The Help. Without The Help‘s four-week run, the average score for the year would have been a point-and-a-half lower.
By Rotten Tomatoes’ own metric of “rottenness,” which a movie achieves with a score less than 60, rotten movies led the pack 24 weeks last year, compared with 25 this year. But bear in mind – we still have several weeks left.
It’s worth noting, though, that receipts in general were down. The top 12-grossing movies each week earned $13 million less on average in 2011 than in 2010 – accounting for half a billion dollars in drop-off alone.”
The Cineaste's Lament. 