1 novembre: News!

	Bad news beyond babedom - A dig at Susan Sarandon sums up the plight of many middle-aged actresses  In humor, there is often truth. So let's examine the cruel joke from the all-marionette "Team America: World Police," which satirizes Susan Sarandon, 58, as an actress whose talent is dwindling as she ages.  It's not unheard-of for people to lose their fire as the years creep by. Has it happened to Sarandon?  First consider that older actresses have a hard time of it. If you remember Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in their horror-movie humiliations of the '60s, perhaps you'll forgive Sarandon for "Rugrats 2." Steady work isn't necessarily memorable work. Other actresses have faded away or disappeared. Annette Bening, 46, only recently returned from a child-raising hiatus to star in "Being Julia," about an older actress who trumps an "All About Eve"-like newcomer. Bening's movie says talent marinates over time. There's marinade, and then there's rust. An ill-advised comeback vehicle can cause a hit-and-run, as in "Taxi," in which Ann-Margret, 63, plays a drunk. Where are the actresses of yesteryear? Last we heard of Geena Davis, 48, she had taken up Olympic archery. (Okay, she was also in the "Stuart Little" movies.) She was sunk by the pirate movie "Cutthroat Island" and has walked a lonely plank ever since.  Debra Winger, 49, stomped off the bandwagon nearly a decade ago, returning in 2001 for "Big Bad Love" (emphasis on "bad"). She is now better known for inspiring "Searching for Debra Winger," Rosanna Arquette's questing 2002 documentary about the plight of actresses over 40 in an industry that values youth and the Y chromosome. Sarandon has stayed visible, but some of her choices have been peculiar since the glory days of "Thelma and Louise" (1991) and "Dead Man Walking" (1995). Her highest-profile movie since then has been "Stepmom." In this melodrama, her character dies nobly (cough! cough!) of a dread disease, which clears the way for Julia Roberts' character. (It takes the opposite tack to "Being Julia.") Sarandon has two movies this fall: "Alfie" and "Shall We Dance?," both sensible choices. But they're no "Vera Drake," a movie that will undoubtedly bring British actress Imelda Staunton, 48, an Oscar nomination for playing a woman in her 50s. Staunton was so good that writer-director Mike Leigh named his untitled project after her character. Granted, "Vera Drake" is a once-in-a-lifetime plum. But not all actresses can count on a director like Leigh to come along. And they can't all hope for the kind of European sensibility that enables older actresses - like Isabelle Huppert, 51, Fanny Ardant, 55, and Charlotte Rampling, 59 - to thrive. If middle-aged American actresses want to stay viable, they've got to get big roles in small movies, or decent roles in big ones. Kim Basinger, 50, got a second wind with the summer movie "Cellular," but she was rarely onscreen with youthful co-star Chris Evans. "Cellular" played like two movies in one, an increasingly common ploy to attract a mixed-generation audience. (The female draw in "Shall We Dance?" is not Sarandon, who plays Richard Gere's oblivious wife, but Jennifer Lopez, who plays his hot mambo instructor.) The joke in "Team America" is more pointed. Is the problem that Sarandon is choosing unwisely by making films like the cringe-inducing "The Banger Sisters," co-starring with Goldie Hawn (now 58)? Or has acting become merely a paycheck for her? Did "Rugrats 2" do her in? Our best guess - the kindest, anyway - is that there's a tipping point, after which mediocre roles and competing priorities lead to a lessening of effort over time. And you know what that means - jokes at one's expense made by marionettes.
	THEATER COUNTS > 2004 > Week #44 - October 29:  20 16 Cellular New Line 308 -125 8.
	WEEKEND BOX OFFICE October 29-31, 2004 Studio Estimates - Cellular NL $150,000 -45% 308 -125 $487 $31,338,000 8.
	CELLULAR: Domestic ($ 31,338,000) + Overseas ($ 3,189,653) = $ 34,527,653.

7 novembre: News!

	CELLULAR - Domestic ($ 31,402,474) + Overseas ($ 3,607,396) = $ 35,009,870. Greece 10/15/04 $592,152 10/31/04  Iceland 10/8/04 $29,640 10/31/04  Israel 9/16/04 $435,789 10/31/04  Philippines 9/17/04 $92,653 10/25/04  Puerto Rico 9/17/04 $432,891 10/27/04  Singapore 10/28/04 $109,600 10/31/04  United Kingdom 9/24/04 $1,914,470 10/20/04
	WEEKEND BOX OFFICE - October 29-31, 2004: 26 21 Cellular NL $151,707 -44.4% 308 -125 $492 $31,339,915 8
	E' prevista per il giorno 11 novembre l'uscita del DVD - Regione 2 di PAESE SELVAGGIO (Eagle).
	THEATER COUNTS > 2004 > Week #45 - November 5: 22 20 Cellular New Line 211 -97 9.
	THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR DVD - Dec. 14th 2004 - FEATURES LIST Region 1 - Snap Case - Anamorphic Widescreen 2.35  Audio Dolby Digital 5.1 English - Dolby Digital 5.1 French  Additional Release Material: Audio Commentary 1. Tod Williams Director, Terry Stacey Director Of Photography, Alfonso Goncalves Editor, Marcelo Zarvos Composer, Eric Daman Costume Designer  Featurette 1. FRAME ON THE WALL  2. NOVEL TO SCREEN, An Interview With John Irving  3. Anatomy Of A Scene
	CELLULAR DVD - jAN. 18TH 2004 - FEATURES LIST Region 1 - Keep Case - Widescreen 2.40  Audio 5.1 Surround Sound English  Additional Release Material  Theatrical Trailer  Preview Trailer from New Line Cinema  Audio Commentary 1. David Ellis Director  2. Larry Cohen Screen Writer  3. Chris Morgan Screen Writer  Deleted/ Alternate Scenes 1. Optional Director Commentary  Featurettes 1. Celling Out A look at cell phones in today's culture.  2. Dialing up Cellular making of the film  3. Code of Silence: Inside the Rampart Scandal  DVD-ROM Features Script-to-Screen
	The Lolita complex European films quite often explore the sexuality of children and young teenagers. North American films rarely do unless it's in an American Pie-style sex farce.  Even when serious filmmakers tackle this sensitive subject matter, as is the case with Nicole Kidman's supernatural thriller Birth, it can cause quite a stir.  In Birth, Kidman plays a 37-year-old widow who believes a 10-year-old boy is the reincarnated spirit of her dead husband. Canadian actor Cameron Bright was 10 when he filmed Birth.  In Birth's most controversial scene, Bright, discovering Kidman in the bath, disrobes and joins her.  Kidman has made it clear in all her interviews that both she and Bright were wearing bathing suits for that scene.  That's not the point. Audiences are asked to believe they are naked.  The bathtub scene was booed at the Venice Film Festival and very few people took up the challenge of muddling through Birth's murky metaphysics and questionable morality when it opened last weekend.  The $20-million US movie has grossed a weak $2 million in its first five days of release.  This past summer in The Door in the Floor, Kim Basinger played an emotionally distraught woman who seduces a 15-year-old boy played by Jon Foster.  Foster was 18 when he filmed the explicit sex scenes with Basinger but, once again, audiences were asked to believe his character was 15.  John Irving, who wrote the novel upon which The Door in the Floor is based, says one of his inspirations was the 1971 wartime coming-of-age drama Summer of '42.  In that film Jennifer O'Neill, 23, played a war widow who tries to find solace in a shy, virginal 15-year-old boy.  Gary Grimes, who played her teen lover, was 15 when Summer of '42 was filmed.  Neither The Door in the Floor this year or Summer of '42 33 years ago whipped up the kind of controversy Birth did.  Chartered psychologist Janet MacKenzie says it's the age of the young person and not the sex that accounts for the lack of ire on the part of audiences.  "A 15-year-old whether male or female is a teenager and we all acknowledge that teens are pretty sexual, but a 10-year-old is a child and to act on any impulse toward a child is crossing a line," says MacKenzie.  Still she cautions that what may be acceptable in a film such as The Door in the Floor is not necessarily so in real life.  "The courts made it clear in the case of teacher Mary Kay Letourneau that seducing a seventh-grade male student will not be tolerated."  In his controversial 1955 novel Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov told the story of a middle-aged man who was smitten with a 12-year-old girl.  Stanley Kubrick was the first filmmaker to tackle Nabokov's novel in 1962.  When Sue Lyon made her film debut playing Lolita for Kubrick she was 15, so she wasn't allowed to attend Lolita's Los Angeles premier because the film carried a restricted rating.  When Adrian Lyne filmed his version of Lolita in 1996 he introduced 16-year-old Dominique Swain in the title role, opposite Jeremy Irons.  In her interviews Swain insisted she "never felt exploited in any way. Adrian was so kind and understanding and protective. He made it very clear this was just a film we were making and that it was based on a great classic, not some piece of trash."  Brooke Shields had just turned 13 when she filmed Louis Malle's controversial drama Pretty Baby in which she played the 12-year-old daughter of a New Orlean's prostitute (Susan Sarandon). The child's virginity becomes the quest of the wealthiest customers at the brothel.  Two years later Shields starred in The Blue Lagoon, the story of a boy and girl abandoned as children on an uninhabited island who explore their sexuality when they reach puberty.  "I had to have my hair glued to the front of my body to make certain I would never be exposed to the cameras," said Shields of her experience filming The Blue Lagoon.  "I also had a body double, who was 18, for several scenes."  In 1976's Taxi Driver, Jodie Foster played an underage prostitute. Like her character, Foster was 14 when she filmed Taxi Driver.  She has since defended the experience, explaining that "nothing is really taboo in literature or film if it is told with honesty, integrity, understanding and compassion for the characters.  "That describes my experience working with Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver."  Foster received her first Oscar nomination for playing this tragic young woman.  Directors insist they do not compromise the integrity of their young actors, especially when a scene requires simulated nudity or sexuality.  In the teen comedy Mean Girls, Lindsay Lohan and her friends are on a scavenger hunt which includes returning with a pair of boxer shorts belonging to the school jock.  Lohan, who was 17 when she filmed Mean Girls, has a scene in which she is hiding in a shower while Jonathan Bennett, 22, disrobes, abandons his boxers and leaves wearing a towel.  "I wasn't even on the set the day Jonathan took off his clothes.  "They filmed me in the shower stall one day and Jonathan taking off his clothes in the same set another day and spliced the footage together."  Tell that to all the young girls who saw Mean Girls and tittered at Lohan's expressions of surprise and excitement.
	GREECE BOX OFFICE - October 22-24: 1 - Brides $496,000 $496,000 1 2 - Shrek 2 $356,400 $356,400 1 3 - The Ladykillers $270,100 $270,100 1 4 - Resident Evil: Apocalypse $184,150 $184,500 1 5 - The Village $136,950 $2,252,800 3 6 - Cellular $113,900 $502,950 2 7 - Before Sunset $80,100 $219,100 2 8 - The Terminal $47,350 $1,254,400 4 9 - The Assassination of Richard Nixon $45,700 $45,700 1 10 - Man on Fire $44,800 $263,750 2 11 - La Mala educación $30,700 $521,800 4 12 - Garfield: The Movie $27,700 $1,195,300 6
	The Door in the Floor SCREEN adaptations of John Irving’s novels tend to add a sentimental gloss (The Cider House Rules, Simon Birch) or embrace the author’s literary conceits so literally that they’re offputtingly grotesque (The Hotel New Hampshire).  The writer-director Tod Williams tries to avoid those pitfalls by adapting only the first third of Irving’s A Widow for One Year. The result is the handsome but coldly distant film The Door in the Floor.  Shifting the action from the dour Eisenhower 1950s to the more picturesque present of a summery Long Island, the film opens as Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), an author-illustrator of dark but popular children’s books, is separating from his wife Marion (Kim Basinger). Both are still in a state of suspended mourning from the death of their two teenage sons.  Ted is now a womanising alcoholic who humiliates the nude models he seduces as a way of lashing out against life’s cruelties. Marion turns to stone whenever someone asks how her sons died; it’s the film’s central mystery. The couple’s four-year-old daughter, Ruth, doesn’t take well to her parents’ split.  When Ted hires as his summer assistant Eddie (Jon Foster), a 16-year-old aspiring writer who looks uncannily like one of the dead boys, the situation worsens. Eddie lusts after Marion. She in turn embraces her role as a kind of Oedipal Mrs Robinson. But there’s every indication that Ted has set them both up.  Basinger is well suited to the role of an emotionally stunted woman; her emotionless stares and hollow body language have rarely been better used. But as written, Marion is an impenetrable, shallow character, a freeze-dried portrait of inconsolable sadness. As Eddie, Foster is irritating at first with his puppy dog naivety, but his performance grows in assurance.  Bridges, one of Hollywood’s steadiest and least appreciated actors, is the reason to see the film. A natural presence with a face that contains a surfer-dude playfulness and a world-weary depression, he almost makes the self-absorbed Ted a tragic figure of misguided passions.  Yet Williams’s film still lacks tone and purpose. Unlike Irving’s multigenerational novel, which sees Ruth grow up to be a famous writer, the film is unclear whether we’re watching Ted, Marion or Eddie’s story. And perhaps weary of his characters’ relentless moves toward disaster, Williams tries to lighten the tone near the end with a jarring sex farce.  Irving is no stranger to slapstick but Williams doesn’t have his assured timing. He sprinkles the film’s narrative with odd happenings and quirky behaviour but they simply lead to awkward moments, such as Ted sleeping in the nude and showing no modesty in front of his little girl.  Everything — from the family demons to May-December sex and lessons in writing — is tied together with a precision that smacks of literary artifice. It’s ultimately hard to care for characters that seem more like conceits than people.

17 novembre: News!

	Dall'11 novembre è disponibile anche in Regione 2 il DVD di PAESE SELVAGGIO (Eagle).
	ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING sarà distribuito in Italia da "DIA - Distributori Indipendenti Associati" dal 3 dicembre.
	WEEKEND BOX OFFICE November 5-7, 2004 25 26 Cellular NL $140,443 -7.4% 211 -97 $665 $31,542,917 9.
	THEATER COUNTS > 2004 > Week #46 Nov. 10 – 12: 23 22 Cellular New Line 171 -40 10.
	WEEKEND BOX OFFICE November 12-14, 2004 - 31 25 Cellular NL $99,204 -29.4% 171 -40 $580 $31,694,425 10.
	CELLULAR - Domestic: $31,595,221 89.0% + Overseas: $3,919,994 11.0% = Worldwide: $35,515,215.
	ESTRENO: “CELLULAR” (www.tripictures.spain.com/cellular). Kim Basinger (que tiene en cartel “Una mujer difícil”) protagoniza “Cellular”, un thriller de suspense dirigido por David Ellis. Chris Evans y William H. Macy completa el reparto. El largometraje comienza cuando Ryan (Chris Evans) recibe por casualidad una llamada en su móvil y se ve repentinamente envuelto en una carrera contrarreloj para salvar la vida de una mujer Jessica Martin .(Kim Basinger), una profesora de vida apacible, que está secuestrada en un lugar misterioso. Jessica no tiene ni idea de los motivos del secuestro y está aterrorizada. Sin embargo, consigue hacer funcionar un teléfono roto y marca un número al azar en un intento desesperado por salvarse. Ryan descubre que es la única esperanza de la mujer. Aunque lo único que conoce de ella es la voz baja y atemorizada al otro lado del teléfono, Ryan se lanza en su búsqueda adentrándose en un mundo lleno de trampas y asesinatos. La vida de Jessica y de su familia está en sus manos pero, ¿qué le espera al otro lado del teléfono? FICHA TÉCNICA: Dirección: David Ellis. Guión: Larry Cohen y Chris Morgan, basado en una historia de Larry Cohen, el autor de “Última llamada”. Producción: Lauren Lloyd y Dean Devlin. Música: John Toman y Lior Rosner. FICHA ARTÍSTICA: Kim Basinger, Chris Evans, William H. Macy, Jason Statham y Eric Christian Olsen. REPORTAJE: “KIM BASINGER. En estos momentos Kim Basinger tiene dos películas en cartel: “Una mujer difícil” y “Cellular”, y “CARTELERA” ha elaborado un reportaje sobre la trayectoria cinematográfica de una actriz que obtuvo el oscar a la “Mejor Actriz de Reparto” por “L. A. Confidential”. Basinger puede alardear de una carrera en la sobran títulos malos y falta coherencia pero ha conseguido que por fín se la considere una actriz. Con más de cincuenta años sigue manteniendo su status de estrella en Hollywood. En el reportaje se repasan títulos tan conocidos como “Una mujer difícil”, “8 millas”, “9 semanas y media”, “Análisis final”, “Soñé con África” o la ya citada “L. A. Confidential”.
	GREECE BOX OFFICE: October 29-31 1 1 Brides $589,900 $1,696,350 2 2 - Collateral $392,650 $392,650 1 3 2 Shrek 2 $225,200 $825,500 2 4 3 The Ladykillers $185,600 $678,400 2 5 4 Resident Evil: Apocalypse $96,850 $405,100 2 6 5 The Village $69,700 $2,378,000 4 7 7 Before Sunset $48,900 $353,600 3 8 6 Cellular $47,750 $641,800 3 9 - Coffee and Cigarettes $44,400 $44,400 1 10 - A Home at the End of the World $24,000 $24,000 1