Daily Archives: August 5, 2006

Teen Box Office Sex Appeal

Box Office, Musings

Some box office hits are easy to predict, but every summer there are a couple of surprises, and this year that list includes John Tucker Must Die, whose robust debut returns were probably at least partially driven by these va-voomish bra-and-panty shots.

Produced for under $18 million, the movie opened on 2,500 screens
and pulled in over $14 million last week, for a hearty $5,576 per
screen gross. Heading into this weekend, it had already added another
$10.5 million to its coffers, and now stands to be quite a tidy
moneymaker for distributor 20th Century Fox, who’s also had another
under-the-radar hit this summer session with The Devil Wears Prada, which has now crawled past $110 million in just over a month of release.

John Tucker Must Die centers on three ex-girlfriends
(Ashanti, Sophia Bush and Arielle Kebbel) of the titular high school
basketball stud and serial cheater (Desperate Housewives’ Jesse Metcalfe) who collaborate to turn the tables on their former beau by getting him to fall for the new girl in town (Brittany Snow) in order to watch him get his heart broken, so sure, it tapped into, in
savvy fashion, a certain vein of female adolescent vengeance.

But
who else thinks these pictures helped drive male attendance amongst the
under-17 set? Though only rated PG-13 — for sexual content and language
— the movie was heavily touted on Comedy Central for the past two weeks, with separate “his and hers” TV ads. Guess which these were a part of?

For her part, Snow (American Dreams, The Pacifier) has already been cast in the big screen musical re-do of Hairspray, but with the box office performance of John Tucker Must Die, look for a, ahem, further bump in profile. Scarlett Johansson may not be looking over her shoulder just yet, but surely the phone calls from the folks at Maxim have already begun.

Time to Leave

Film Reviews

including this item on Swimming Pool, but Time to Leave
represents a return to his least stylized mode of work, as well as
being perhaps his most personal movie. The film centers on gay
photographer Romain (Le Divorce’s Melvil Poupaud, a sort of
Gaelic Matthew Fox), a standoffish and secular Parisian in his early
30s, who finds out that he has inoperable cancer and only a few months
to live. From there, Romain begins to act up. He breaks up with his
boyfriend Sasha (Christian Sengewald), spitting, “Like with all
couples, routine is killing desire.” And he lashes out at his sister
Sophie (Louise-Anne Hippeau), nastily assessing her fragile marriage
and asserting he has no desire to ever photograph her children. He’s
acting out of pure instinct, but showing all these emotions to come
from a selfish, self-centered place.

Romain’s deepest connection is with his grandmother Laura (Jeanne
Moreau), and it’s only to her that he can disclose the news of his
sickness. And then, just as Romain’s world is getting smaller and
turning inexorably inward, he’s happened upon by Jany (Valeria
Bruni-Tedeschi), a waitress who has had trouble conceiving a child with
her sterile husband. She makes Romain a proposition which he initially
refuses, but then — as illness and emaciation sets in — he comes to
more deeply consider.

Short (83 minutes), tightly shot and anchored by Poupaud’s excellent performance, Time to Leave
is essentially a melodrama drained of any florid touches. When tears
finally occur we don’t see them prominently featured, but rather only
the in-profile tracts of where they’ve already rolled. Ozon (top left,
with Poupaud) builds to an elegiac finale that doesn’t beseech you with
its lamentations. We all have a Time to Leave, the film reminds us, though for some that time is cruelly too soon. Distributed by Strand Releasing, Time to Leave is in limited release now, expanding throughout the month.