BEING FLYNN:  Watch It At Home – Troubling Story That Doesn’t Go Deep Enough   There’s a scene in Paul Weitz’s new film BEING FLYNN where Jonathan Flynn (Robert DeNiro), the alcoholic, narcissistic, pitiful, self-destructive father of Nick (Paul Dano), reads to his son from a publisher’s rejection letter.  Jonathan sees himself as […]

>The ninth weekend of the year should generate about $125 million for the top 12 films, a fairly typical weekend for the first weekend in March — up 2% from last year’s comparable weekend and down a negligible 1% from the four-year average for this weekend.  Universal should stand tall with a $44 million opening […]

> Well, that didn’t last long. After an Oscars+1 day where Best Picture winner THE ARTIST had the smallest Monday decline of any movie in the Top 10,  by Tuesday the glow was gone.  On a day when almost every Top 10 film was significantly up, ccording to Box Office Mojo, Artist had an increase […]

>Eight full weeks into 2012, domestic box office continues to run well ahead of last year’s slow pace and now is almost 10% ahead of the comparable period’s average for the last several years. The Past Week: Total Box Office Volume All films in wide release playing between February 20 and February 26 grossed a […]

> Moving on… As we all know, last night was the Rise Of the Planet Of the Black-and-White Silent French People.  For some of us, this was not good news.  But there’s always next year!  Which means this year.  So let’s see what’s on the horizon for the 2012 Academy Awards: Harvey Weinstein seems to […]

> The Academy limits the number of movie ads that can be aired on the Oscar telecast (until recent years, they didn’t allow any), so as not to make the night look like the awards are shilling for the studios.  (God forbid!)  It’s not clear whether that’s the reason only 2 movie promos made it […]

> Until its final 45 minutes, the one thing that could be said about this year’s Oscar telecast was that it was at least brisk.  Merely 2 hours and 15 minutes into the show, there were amazingly only 3 awards and the In Memorium segment still to go.  But for ABC, running under the appointed […]

> It’s a measure of how desperately this year’s Oscar needed some kind of surprise that the closest thing to a thrill all evening was Meryl Streep’s win as Best Actress.  Streep has been winning Academy Awards since 1979, and she’d been touted for her performance as Margaret Thatcher since months before THE IRON LADY […]