Serena
It’s funny. Two weeks ago Mockingjay opened with the full-court-press marketing: Posters, TV ads, Jennifer Lawrence on all the talk shows. Now we have the other Jennifer Lawrence movie of the season, a period drama called Serena, where she stars opposite her Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle co-star Bradley Cooper, and what are we getting? Crickets. The film opens on one screen out in Bayers Lake only, not even a prestige opening at The Oxford, which is getting a documentary!
Goes to show, the big money these days is in concept, not stars. We all love J-Law, but it’s the post-apocalypse science fiction that gets the bums in seats, not a story about a couple running a timber business in North Carolina in the 1930s, directed by Academy Award-winning Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier (Love Is All You Need, A Better World).
Citizenfour
Here’s the doc in at The Oxford: Laura Poitras’s film about American whistleblower Edward Snowden, who in 2013 contacted her by email saying he wanted to talk about classified information he had on the illegal wiretapping activities of American intelligence agencies like the NSA. She went to meet Snowden in Hong Kong and filmed the meetings. He has since sought refuge from US authorities in Russia. From what I gather, this is more than a documentary of a controversial subject, this is reportage on history as it happens. We’re lucky to have it in cinemas and I’m really looking forward to it.
Corner Gas: The Movie
Of all the great Canadian TV series that might have found a home on the big screen, this was the one producers were able to finance? What bizarro world are we living in?
