My brother called me up yesterday asking whether he should go seeThe Dark Knight in IMAX this Friday. I think I laughed for roughly five minutes straight before explaining to him that IMAX tickets for this flick are sold out for at least a week (in NYC). But I'm sure there are a lot of you out there who caught the buzz late and really want to see this film on an IMAX screen opening weekend. I think you know where I'm going with this ...
Yes, you can currently find an assortment of Dark Knight IMAX tickets up for sale on eBay. Seeing this film in NYC is so popular that one pair of tickets for a Sunday morning 10am show is about to sell for $89! After 20 bids! That's insane. Someone is going to pay almost ninety dollars to see a movie on a Sunday morning. But not all the tickets are that expensive: You can get three tickets for a showing at the Mall of Georgia for only $30, or you can spend a whopping $200 for two tickets to the one IMAX theater in Kentucky. Or -- and this is the kicker -- what about $350 for the opening 3am show in West Nyack.
Anyone crazy enough to buy some jacked-up IMAX tickets off eBay? How much would you pay?
A little over a year ago, I was assigned a "Cinematical Seven" on the most overrated actors in Hollywood. I stand by five of my choices, but things have changed for two of the others. Heath Ledger (#4) was one, and his amazing performances in both I'm Not There and The Dark Knight proved me wrong, not to mention that he's no longer alive to be overrated, underrated or any kind of rated. The other was Ben Kingsley (#1). For some reason I have seen five Ben Kingsley movies in the past three months. Seeing such a wide range of performance in such a short time has caused me to re-think my opinion on him. The first Kingsley film I saw this year was The Wackness (31 screens), as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. I didn't much like the film; I found it to be a rather bland, tame coming-of-age picture disguised as a daring snapshot-of-an-era movie. And Kingsley's performance as a pot-smoking shrink struck me as yet another piece of overacting, with lots of weird pauses and run-on sentences in his dialogue.
His turn as the villain in War, Inc. (20 screens) didn't fare much better. I liked the film, but strapped to a wheelchair, his immobile body only increased his tendency to overdo it in his line readings. The third movie, Transsiberian (opening this week on 2 screens), proved somewhat more interesting. He played a Russian narcotics detective, complete with an accent, but somehow his performance perfectly clicked with that sturdy suspense film. The fourth film, The Love Guru (over 400 screens), was by far the worst of the lot but also proved the most revealing.
The international trailer for Body of Lies has just arrived online, and the combo of Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio is enticing to say the least. Based on the novel by David Ignatius (and scripted by The Departed's William Monahan), Body of Lies tells of a former journalist (DiCaprio) who's hired by the CIA to track down an Al Qaeda leader in Jordan. The film was directed by Ridley Scott.
Cinematical's Eugene Novikov recently used Body of Lies as part of his From Page to Screen column, and on the book he says: "Body of Lies, the novel, is pitched as a spy thriller informed by the author's extensive experience in the field and knowledge of the way the CIA really operates. (The back cover offers a fawning quote from former CIA director George Tenet, claiming that the book is "fiction but reads like fact.") It's certainly intelligent, plausible, and sometimes exciting." The trailer seems to focus more on that "sometimes exciting" part, showing DiCaprio in all sorts of iffy situations, while his CIA boss (played by an overweight and somewhat unattractive Russell Crowe) rides his ass until something gives. Body of Lies hits theaters on October 10.
My brother called me up yesterday asking whether he should go see