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N_Bourbaki wrote:Ugh, BD-r though. That's unfortunate.

I actually missed this part of it, which SUCKS. I'll be hopeful for the UK release which is coming theatrically in a few weeks to result in a proper disc; it's apparently been released in France already too, which will be my back-up plan if it doesn't pan out. Thankfully Amazon seems to be generally backing away from working with Roadside so this and the one other missing title (The Only Living Boy in New York) are just weird titles that fell in between the cushions and got forgotten instead of the new normal.

Normally I don't care about these things, but I kind of felt like this was film was dumped, so I checked the numbers.

It opened in just four theaters, and its widest release was 261 theaters (i.e. probably wasn't shown much outside of arthouses). From beginning to end, it was in theaters for 11 weeks, which would seem short for a slow rollout.

Grosses: Domestic: $1,060,377 + Foreign: $1,419,478 = $2,479,855 total

For something that was essentially a family friendly film, pretty dismal numbers.

Still way better numbers than a release from Netflix would have got it; and there's already a pressed disc available from France (and one is probably coming from the UK too). Ultimately I think this and the Only Living Boy in New York are just sad holdovers from a period where Amazon was licensing their films to distributors to where they are now, distributing the films themselves, and will hopefully just be the only two to get this treatment.

You can stream it in UHD, for what it's worth, too.

The $1 million domestic isn't really that bad for 250 theaters - better that then go wide and only make $2.5 million. But this movie was just mishandled from beginning to end (Last Flag Flying was too, but that's an argument for a different day). I've got high hopes for Amazon with Beautiful Boy and Life Itself this year and hope they don't disappoint considering they both seem like good commercial plays for this kind of indie/prestigey market.

I know in my “art house” (multiplex chain that plays big indies) it was playing during the same window as The Florida Project. If this didn’t sell as a family film then it should have as an art movie about kids, and Florida Project clearly stole a lot of its thunder there. This was in and out in a week while Florida Project stuck around for a good 5-6.

As expected, it is receiving a proper release in the UK on pressed disc with some features (though not particularly exciting ones) courtesy of StudioCanal.

whaleallright wrote: Sun Apr 01, 2018 6:17 pm And although the Carter Burwell score was pastiche as per his usual, I still liked the slightly incongruous Robert Fripp-esque guitar in the '70s scenes and some of the Mickey Mousing in the "silent" scenes.

That wasn't Fripp-esque, it was Fripp. It was the title track from Fripp & Eno's 1975 Evening Star. So Burwell only deserves credit for taste rather than mimicry!

I found this DGA interview with Todd Haynes and Ed Lachman.

It was done for Wonderstruck, but it does cover their history together. (The fact that Far From Heaven didn't use a DI when it had already become an industry standard really stuck out - I saw that when it came out and it made me take notice of Lachman for the first time. The cinematography alone just knocked me out, and you could tell there was something special in the way it looked compared to other films you'd see in the very same theater. Not only in the film's aesthetics but the pictorial quality of the print itself. Also, Ed's observation that he was making it look like "a backlot soap opera" when they were shooting in real locations is pretty hilarious but I think it also creates a great bit of alchemy within the film - it does have all those special qualities of a studio lot production while managing to feel very rooted in the real world instead of a constructed set on a soundstage.)

I actually thought about The French Connection when I saw those '70s scenes in Wonderstruck, so it's nice to find out that Haynes actually did have that in mind. It only came to mind as a general example of a film that naturalistically looked like New York in the early '70s - perhaps there's no better example of that in a feature film shot on 35mm?

The part about the look book also stands out because a couple of days ago, MoMA held a conversation with casting directors Ellen Lewis and Laura Rosenthal, and Rosenthal actually showed the look book Haynes put together for May December - it was interesting to see what went into it, and it would be interesting to see the ones Haynes has put together for his other films. (An old Film Comment article suggests that Haynes actually brought his look book for Wonderstruck to its Cannes premiere and let people see it.)

He did the same for the May December lookbook. Devika Girish and Dennis Lim talk about it with him on a recent Cannes episode of the Film Comment podcast.

I'm surprised Todd Haynes doesn't have his own thread in the Filmmakers subforum. I was going to post about that upcoming new project with Joaquin Phoenix that he's talked a bit about.