Followup: Did you find Sunshine or did you dig Scoop?
By Burbanked on Aug 1, 2006 in Movies, Views and Reviews | 745 views |
A while back I asked which movie you’d choose to see if Little Miss Sunshine and Scoop were opening on the same day, purely based on viewing the trailers for each. My point was that Sunshine sure looked like a better time at the movies to me, even though it wasn’t created by Hollywood’s Clown Prince of Unassailable Cinema.
With both films in theaters now, it’s interesting to take a look at some early results, especially because Scoop was tracking at a fairly miserable Rotten Tomatoes rating (39% critics; 60% users) as compared to LMS’s damn near blockbustery 90/100%.
But what’s bizarre to me is that even when a Woody Allen movie is reviewed as poorly as this one is, the negative comments still sound really positive! Elbert Ventura, writing at Reverse Shot, classifies Scoop as “limp”, “lazy” and “inconsequential”. “A murder mystery bled of any tension”, but still:
“Those of us who elevated [Woody Allen] to the pantheon long ago might be more charitable, shaking our heads at its patchiness, yet lapping up its singular, shallow pleasures.”
I guess I just don’t get why a lazy, mediocre film director still deserves “elevation to a pantheon”. I’m kooky like that.
And at first glance, Scoop would also seem to have it all over Sunshine as far as box office results, earning about $3 million on its opening as opposed to the paltry not-even-half-million earned by LMS.
That is, until you look closer and realize that Sunshine opened on less than 10 movie screens and therefore averaged over 10 times the domestic box office of Scoop in their opening weeks of release.
I’m just saying.
My blog-love affair with cartoonist Doug Savage’s terrific daily Savage Chickens (
(
because clearly Cage has decided to become action/thriller cinema’s first Polish great-grandma. (
Well, that’s too bad. Back a year or so ago when I heard that they’d be making a movie out of Judi and Ron Barrett’s terrific kids’ book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I hoped maybe it’d be made live-action. Handled well, the idea of seeing an actual town where it rained hotdogs and baked beans in an open-roof restaurant, as well as the bit where sanitation trucks clean up all the leftover rain/snow/food and feed it to the pets would be, I thought, a bundle of CG-imbued cinema fun. 
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D Prince | Aug 2, 2006 | Reply
I am so sick of Woody Allen, I can’t even express it.
And Annie Hall is my favourite movie.