'Red Riding'

IFC Films will release the Red Riding trilogy on February 5th in limited release and through their VOD platform. This three-tiered production was originally aired on UK television and had playdates at the Telluride, New York and Chicago Film Festivals.

It consists of three films: 1974, 1980 and 1983, all helmed by three different directors chronicling the decade-long true-life search for the "Yorkshire Ripper."

Review: 'Leap Year' [D+]

By Chase Kahn

It's almost comical how many genre conventions are employed in Anand Tucker's exhaustingly phony and phoned-in romantic tripe, but that would mislead some people into believing that Leap Year is actually funny. It isn't just a slow-drip of queasy, predictable amorous balderdash, but an uncontrolled geyser.

The film isn't so much written by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont as it is regurgitated - partly from the duo's own insufferable filth in 2008's Made of Honor. Anna, a love-starved yuppie (Amy Adams) travels to Ireland to propose to her boyfriend on Leap Day, an Irish tradition.

Through a series of intense interruptions by mother nature (perhaps an unsuccesful attempt at preventing the audience's oncoming misery) she finds her and her Louis Vuitton traveling case stranded at an old Irish pub, where a good deal of wise-cracking, Lucky Charms drunkards are there to greet her along with a cynical, yet quietly dreamy Declan (Matthew Goode), who in an attempt to pay off the bills on his bar/restaraunt, agrees to drive Anna to Dublin where her snappy, hair-gel beau (Adam Scott) awaits.

From here, Leap Year stumbles into a cinematic freefall of hackneyed coincidence and squeamish banality, as Anna and Declan magically realize, on their soul-searching journey through the Irish countryside, (which apparently is photographed to resemble Middle-Earth more than anything) that they may have more in common than they first thought.

To duplicate the mechanics of Leap Year, all you would have to do is write two characters who start off hating each other, reveal love-broken, torturous backstories, write a scene where the two have to pretend that they're a couple in the eyes of strangers and then have them stumble into a wedding. If that's not enough to win over the studio execs, write a confessional speech in a public setting, where one pronounces their love to the other. (Yes, all of these things happen.)

There's even plenty of city-girl-lost-in-the-countryside humor (as seen in The Proposal and New in Town) plus a borderline-offensive Irish-folk soundtrack that sounds like one of those regional music-sampler kiosks that you would find in a Super Target.

And no, not even the charms of Amy Adams could elevate this material beyond the rubbish that it so obviously revels in. If they renamed it Romantic Movie and inserted the Wayans Brothers, it would make for one extremely perceptive parody - if only the Wayans were that subtle.

Weekend Box-Office 1 - Jan. 8-10

By Chase Kahn

(All numbers are estimates provided by Nikki Finke at Deadline-Hollywood)

1. Avatar (20th Century Fox) - $48.5 million
2. Sherlock Holmes (Warner. Bros) - $16.7 million
3. Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (Fox) - $16.3 million
4. Daybreakers (Lionsgate) - $14.5 million
5. It's Complicated (Universal) - $11 million
6. Leap Year (Universal) - $9.5 million
7. The Blind Side (Warner Bros.) - $7.5 million
8. Up in the Air (Paramount) - $7.1 million
9. Youth in Revolt (The Weinstein Company) - $6.5 million
10. Princess and the Frog (Disney/Buena Vista) - $4.5 million


Well, the post-holiday boost is gone, and even against three new releases, Avatar held quite well, easily winning the weekend and now up to $429 million domestically after four weeks, and that's before the Oscar boost will kick in at the start of February. Sherlock Holmes meanwhile, continues to perform well, although the Warner Bros. guys have to be thinking, "what if?" in regards to Avatar's success. Even in the same demographic, for Holmes to be able to surpass $200 million directly against one of the biggest movies of all-time is nothing to sneeze at.

Among the new releases, Daybreakers performed the best, proving that vampires are still very much in. With a $15 million opening weekend, Lionsgate has a winner on their hands, considering the meager budget and the lengthy post-production schedule.

Leap Year disappointed for Universal, not even cracking past the studios own It's Complicated, which has been out for three weeks and continues to show good legs, while Youth in Revolt is another bomb for the Weinsteins, whose late-season shuffling (Nine, The Road, Youth in Revolt) proved to be ill-advised.

Meanwhile, Up in the Air has quietly grossed $54 million domestically for Paramount, which should soften the blow from The Lovely Bones failure, which will finally open in wide release next week, with poor limited runs and bad reviews on its ledger.

Review: 'Daybreakers' [C-]

By Chase Kahn

For the first few moments of Michael and Peter Spierig's Daybreakers, with its creepy, noirish evocation of a world now overrun with vampires - their auburn-tinted eyes flaring up like cigarettes in the blue-steeled night - it appears that the German-born writers/directors/brothers have injected much needed life into this popular-as-ever genre of immortal blood-suckers.

Just five percent of the human population remains, which means more fanged-mouths than precious mortal blood, and the vampire race on the verge of devolving into nasty, winged bottom-feeders called "subsiders," an inconvenient truth as a result of blood-depravity.

Enter Edward Dalton, a hematologist played by Ethan Hawke who refuses to drink real, natural blood as a side-effect of human sympathy. He's approached by a minority resistance fighter (Claudia Karvan) who spots his softness and introduces him to a big-eyed, goateed Willem Dafoe who claims he has a cure for immortality, although we get the idea that he's more interested in cars than in humanity.

And thus, after the initial set-up, with blood-lust on the mind, Daybreakers dissolves into a barrage of exploding parts and vampire hokum - deviating sharply from implausible action/horror to excessive splatter-comedy. (I couldn't tell if a wide-angle slow-motion shot of soldiers indulging in jugular evisceration was meant to be fawned over or laughed at). And Willem Dafoe's Lionel "Elvis" Cormac, who spews one-liners ripped from the Stephen Sommers playbook, doesn't help matters.

Nor does the script's phony revisionist mythology, with its cure for immortality coming off as a stretch even in this world that the Spierig's have created, where drivers can maneuver cars across dilapidated bridges through the viewpoints of bullet holes and vampires own stainless-steel cutlery sets (to cut what, exactly?).

By the time it reaches its bloody, stake-to-the-heart conclusion, combustion wins out over more interesting questions of immortality vs. humanity. In the end, Daybreakers, for all of its promises of genre re-imagining, is never interested in more than a cheap thrill - it just comes off as redundant and woefully inept.

Classic Rewind: 'The Snake Pit' (1948)

By Chase Kahn

I have a feeling that Olivia de Havilland's performance as a patient in an insane asylum in Anatole Litvak's The Snake Pit ('48) was the role that she had been working and fighting towards her entire career. No longer Errol Flynn's damsel-in-distress or Bette Davis' better half, the trailblazing brown-eyed actress went cuckoo for this Oscar-nominated performance.

Based on Mary Jane Ward's novel, The Snake Pit begins with Virginia Cunningham (de Havilland) perched on a bench. We hear her thoughts (as we do throughout) as she appears to be having a conversation with a man who is currently out of frame - the camera then pulls out to reveal the setting to be the side-yard of a mental institution, with Virginia not remembering how she got there.

And thus begins a psychological mystery through the mind of a woman who is mentally broken-down to the point where she's nearly non-existent. Olivia de Havilland's performance is ripe with authenticity even when the film isn't. As Virginia's diagnosis comes to the surface, through a deluge of flashbacks and off-screen narrations, although the content is accurate, it feels like a convoluted B-movie mystery at times with weak supporting performances and quick and condensed montages.

The scenes that really work are the ones present inside the institution (interactions amongst patients, dances, social events, etc.) which serve as much to drive the story as they do to expose the current conditions of the mental-care facilities during the mid-20th century. And it's not in an obvious, condemning way, like portraying the guards and doctors as manipulative, exploitative villains. It's more interested in depicting the inadequacies of the facility through overpopulation, staff relationships and ignorance within the higher-uppers, who make decisions frequently without consent.

According to 20th Century Fox, twenty-six out of forty-eight states had enacted reform legislation in regards to their mental institutions as a result of The Snake Pit, a film carried dramatically by Ms. de Havilland's performance and validated by its cultural significance.

On the Cheap

By Chase Kahn



Bought about thrity minutes ago, John Huston's "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" ('48), Mervyn LeRoy's "The FBI Story" ('59) and "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" ('32), plus Delmer Daves' "Destination Tokyo" ('44) for $35.68.

Movie Weekend 1: January 8th, 2010

By Chase Kahn

Ahh, the first movie weekend of 2010. Time to start over and hit refresh. I'll hopefully be talking about the new releases every Thursday at this time. Three wide releases this week, here we go:

"Daybreakers" (Lionsgate) [2,523]

2009 was the year of the vampire, and so 2010 starts with another take on the legend by the German-born brothers, Michael and Peter Spierig. This time, the majority vampires turn their attention to the dwindling human race in a desperate attempt to save their lifeforce and food supply. Ethan Hawke and Millem Dafoe star in what should be decent genre fare. 67% RT, 63 Metacritic.

"Leap Year" (Universal) [2,511]

Poor Amy Adams. She plays a preppy, love-starved yuppie stuck in Wales trying to get to Ireland to propose to her boyfriend on Leap Day. This romantic tale follows two tried-and-true genre formulas: 1) The city-girl stuck and misplaced in a rural, foreign region and 2) The girl who pretends that if she doesn't get married, she's worthless, bottomless rubble. Poor Amy Adams. 22% RT, 37 Metacritic.

"Youth in Revolt" (Dimension/Weinstein Company) [1,873]

This anti-Michael Cera comedy, where he tries to win the heart of a girl by creating an alter-ego named Francois Dillinger, premiered at Toronto last September before being pushed back to January by the Weinstein's in a movie-shuffle that also included pushing "Nine" back to Christmas (whoops!). Reviews are decent - it will probably bomb, Weinstein's can't catch a break. 67% RT, 63 Metcritic.

Happy movie times.