The Road Videos

Do we flip out and kill Ninja Assassin? How do we feel at the end of The Road? Is Left 4 Dead 2 a worthy sequel or just expensive DLC? Plus, we train our minds to control the force!

Do we flip out and kill Ninja Assassin? How do we feel at the end of The Road? Is Left 4 Dead 2 a worthy sequel or just expensive DLC? Plus, we train our minds to control the force!

It's a bit disconcerting when a movie takes a 70% tumble in its second weekend, and still ends up with a $66 million holiday take, but that's Twilight fans for you. New Moon took all of eight days to get to $200 million, a number bested only by The Dark Knight and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It doesn't look like New Moon's staying power will be particularly impressive, but when your movie opens to $142 million, you don't really need it. A movie that might be sticking around the top of the charts for a few weeks yet is The Blind Side, which surged to get an 18% boost over its strong opening weekend (3-day numbers). The relentlessly positive movie no doubt was helped by families looking for something generically acceptable to watch together over the holiday weekend. Even those who don't care for The Blind Side should be happy that most families chose it over the universally despised Old Dogs, which landed in fourth place with $24 million over the five-day weekend, about $15 million less than its predecessor-in-everything-but-name (but really in name too), Wild Hogs, made in its three-day opening. The weekend's other major debut was Ninja Assassin, which put up a lukewarm $21 million. That's weaker than the non-holiday opening of the last McTeigue/Wachowski Bros. collaboration, V for Vendetta, despite Ninja Assassin seemingly having broader potential appeal (I mean, come on -- ninjas). Opening in limited release was Dimension's The Road, which did okay on just over 100 screens. It seems safe to say that the dark, grimy post-apocalyptic thriller won't be a breakout hit. The holiday top 11 after the jump. Filed under: New Releases, Box OfficeContinue reading Weekend Box Office: 'New Moon' Edges 'Blind Side' Over Thanksgiving Permalink | Email this | Comments

November 27 - 29, 2009. What did audiences feast on this Thanksgiving weekend? Host Grace Randolph gives you the latest box office report plus her own review of Twilight New Moon, A Christmas Carol and Fantastic Mr. Fox! Vote for the Top 10 Movies of 2009 - http://tinyurl.com/BTT2009

Making a movie about a character whose name you never reveal sounds backwards and bizarre. How are we supposed to identify with the protagonist if we don't even know what to call him? But many films go that route, including this week's movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which doesn't name the man or the boy who occupy almost every frame of it. That's in keeping with McCarthy's novel, which is spare and bleak and doesn't use much punctuation, either. (The apocalypse wiped out most of the world's apostrophes.) Here are seven other movies whose central characters' names are kept hidden from us. Fight Club. Currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, this modern classic follows novelist Chuck Palahniuk's lead by not naming the narrator, played by Edward Norton and identified simply as "The Narrator" in the credits. (Some viewers have thought the character is named Jack due to the Narrator's use of expressions like "I am Jack's cold sweat" and "I am Jack's raging bile duct," but he'd previously established that these are metaphors adapted from an old educational pamphlet he read where "Jack" was the generic name given.) The Narrator is intended to represent 20th-century men in general: repressed, emasculated, and timid. Of course, if you've seen the movie, you know we might actually wind up learning his name after all.... Filed under: Cinematical SevenContinue reading Cinematical Seven: Movies with Nameless Main Characters Permalink | Email this | Comments

Joint Failures Episode 6: Chris and John review the movie 2012, and debate if american culture is afraid of nudity! Plus a review of the book, The Road, and a frank discussion about the first

Viggo Mortensen is a study in contradictions: rugged and undeniably virile, and yet thoroughly and irresistibly sensitive; the kind of man movie stars are made from, but seemingly more satisfied in a more subdued role in a smaller film. Appropriately, his latest film is both a post-apocalyptic epic and a profound character study; The Road is an adaptation of the acclaimed Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, and Viggo plays its main character, a father desperately trying to protect his son from an unhospitable world, both physically and emotionally. Cinematical recently sat down with Mortensen at the film's press day to discuss his work in the film, which was directed by John Hillcoat (The Proposition). In addition to talking about navigating an unforgiving landscape, he discussed the challenges of balancing fealty to source material and simply making a fulfilling movie, and revealed a few of his own fears and insecurities when facing the prospect of sustaining a career both as a movie star and character actor, often at the same time. You can read our interview with director John Hillcoat over here. Cinematical: Given the richness of the source material and the familiarity that audiences will have with it, do you make an effort to draw upon the text for your character, or do you have to divorce yourself from it and focus on what's in the script?Filed under: Fandom, The Weinstein Co., InterviewsContinue reading Interview: Viggo Mortensen Permalink | Email this | Comments

In this week's Summary Judgment, Mark Jordan Legan sums up what critics are saying about the big weekend movies: The Road, Ninja Assassin, and Old Dogs.