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WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND January 4, 2019 – Escape Room

Happy New Year!

Thankfully, we’re getting a fairly light first weekend to the year, which is good, since I was ready to retire after last year’s sucky year. But it’s 2019, a new year and hopefully one with new opportunities. In fact, I wrote something previewing the 2019 box office for my old boss at VitalThrills.com, which you can read here.

As far as this weekend, and as has been the case a few times over the past few years, the year is kicking off with a horror movie.

ESCAPE ROOM (Sony)

This high concept horror movie is the sole release of the weekend, and why not? After all, the film’s director Adam Robitel kicked off 2018 with Insidious: The Last Key, which he directed, and that opened with $29.6 million on its way to $67.6 million domestic and $100 million overseas.

There’s actually a pretty long history of horror movies kicking off the New Year with big business, even though most studios are afraid those returning to work/school after the long holiday might be too focused on work/school to go to the movies. Usually, these horror films are fairly low-budget, so there isn’t much danger, but there have a few substantial hits in the first weekend of January like Taken 3 and Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Revenant. In 2012, Paramount opened the high-concept horror The Devil Insideto $33.7 million, and that movie cost a cool million so it was instantly profitable. Another early January hit was 2005’s White Noise from Universal, which opened with $24.1 million; 2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3D also opened with $21 million. Few of these movies are expected to stay around very long and few of them last beyond opening weekend.

As with many horror movies, the cast doesn’t do much to sell the movie, as Robitel stars in this one along with Deborah Ann Woll (Netflix’s Daredevil), Taylor Russell (Lost in Space), Tyler Labine and others whom I’ve never heard of.

At one point this had the generic title of “The Maze,” so it was a wise move to change the movie’s title to something that’s easy to understand (and works on a couple levels), since most young people that might be interested in the movie will know what an escape room is and may have even taken part in one or two.

Being the only new movie this weekend should help it bring in some of its projected younger target audience, especially being so different from other options in theaters. Coming out just two days after people are back from vacation may mean their priorities lie elsewhere, but this still should be good for somewhere between $12 and 15 million this weekend, and it should be able to make between $30 to 40 million depending how much it gets destroyed once Glassopens in two weeks.

MINI-REVIEW: Assuming you already know what an escape room is or have participated in one, then you’ll already know what to expect from this high-concept thriller that’s more about tension than gore. Then again, if you’ve seen Cube,Saw II or are even vaguely familiar with Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, then you’ll also be ready for this idea of strangers thrown together into a puzzle game of survival.

Personally, I prefer comparing it to Final Destination, my favorite horror franchise, as that also throws people together into situations where they have to work together to survive, the winner being promised $10,000. From the very first room, which turns into a giant oven, it’s obvious that it’s going to be harder to escape with one’s life.

In most horror movies, the characters are mostly stereotypes, including a-holes and idiots alike, who you’re eager to see killed off. In the case of Escape Room, there are actually likeable people including Taylor Russell’s shy science nerd Zoey, Deborah Ann Woll’s Amanda, a veteran of the Iraq War and other equally compelling (or annoying) characters.

What’s good is that Escape Room knows viewers need to be invested in and entertained by these people, which is why you have comic relief in Tyler Labine’s Mike and escape room expert/enthusiast Danny (Nik Dodani). Jay Ellis’ Jason is the clear-cut a-hole finance guy stereotype, while Ben (Logan Miller) is the underdog who never gets a break.

As they go through the rooms, we learn more about their pasts and what links them together, which makes things far more compelling and emotional as it becomes obvious that any of them can die at any time.

The key to movies like this is when it gets to that third act, and there needs to be some sort of reveal of why these six people are being put through all of this and who is responsible. It’s often the point when movies like this can succeed or fail, and if you’re familiar with other films in this genre of horror, you can probably guess some of those things and probably be right.

If you can get past the decision to leave things open-ended without all the expected answers, Escape Room is equal parts clever and fun, pretty much the movie experience being advertised.

RATING: 7.5/10

This week’s Top 10 should look something like this…

1. Aquaman (Warner Bros.) - $24.8 million -53%

2. Mary Poppins Returns (Disney) - $15.5 million -45%

3. Escape Room (Sony) - $14.6 million N/A*

4. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse (Sony) - $10 million -45%

5. Bumblebee (Paramount) - $9.6 million -53%

6. The Mule (Warner Bros.) - $7.1 million -40%

7. Vice (Annapurna) - $4.5 million -42%

8. Second Act (STXfilms) - $4 million -45%

9. Holmes and Watson (Sony) - $3.5 million -55%

10. Ralph Breaks the Internet (Disney) – $3.1 -52%

* After seeing the movie and how well it plays with an audience, I have upped my weekend prediction.

LIMITED RELEASES

Opening on Wednesday at the IFC Center is Oscar-nominated filmmaker Christian Frei (War Photographer) and Maxim Arbugave’s doc GENESIS 2.0 (KimStim), a documentary that profiles the hunters who brave the North Sibeiran Islands looking for rare mastodon tusks and other artifacts that are worth quite a good deal of money. While the tusks are often bought for a substantial resale value, they’re also are being preserved for the Mammoth Museum in Russia, and Frei’s film looks at the scientific efforts of North Korean scientists to find a sample of living mammoth DNA that can be cloned to bring the prehistoric creature back. Much of the film focuses on the Grigoriev brothers, Semyon being a paleontologist who runs the Mammoth Museum; as well as Spira Slepstov, a first-time tusk hunter in it for the “big money” promised by investors; geneticist George Church, one of the pioneers in synthetic biology; and controversial Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang, who has cloned hundreds of dogs and hopes to help the efforts to bring back the mammoth. There’s some really interesting science on display in the film which harks back to the documentary work by Werner Herzog with films like Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Encounters at the End of the World. (Frei’s narration isn’t nearly as commanding but it adds to the comparisons.) It also should be of interest for those who enjoy sci-fi films like Jurassic Park, as it explores the real science behind the science fiction. Genesis 2.0 will also open at L.A.’s Laemmle Music Hall on Jan. 18.

Another doc opening at the IFC Center is the Polish Oscar-shortlisted COMMUNION (from director Anna Zamecka looks at the lives of 14-year-old Ola, a Polish teen who must care for her autistic brother Nikodem while preparing him for his first Holy Communion, while also dealing with a lay-about father who relies more and more on his teen daughter. I was generally mixed on the film only because I’m not as big a fan of cinema verité-style documentary filmmaking i.e. just rolling the camera to show the lives and offering no narrative to help viewers understand the story.

Based on true events, Gerard Butler and Peter Mullan (Ozark) star in Kristoffer Nyholm’s suspense thriller THE VANISHING (Saban Films) about three lighthouse keepers working on a remote Scottish island who discover a wrecked rowboat on which is a chest full of gold, forcing the men to make some tough decisions. It opens in New York (Cinema Village), L.A. (AMC’s University City Walk) and other cities as well as On Demand this Friday. This is actually a fairly decent film, mostly due to the two lead actors doing a rare smaller film in their native country and accents.

Jen McGowan’s thriller Rust Creek (IFC Midnight) stars Hermione Corfield (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) as ambitious college senior Sawyer who takes a wrong turn on a way to a job interview and ends up in the frozen Kentucky woods pursued by outlaws until she hooks up with an enigmatic loner (Jay Paulson). It opens at the IFC Center and other theaters, as well as On Demand.

The final thriller (of sorts) this weekend is Meredith Danluck’s directorial debut State Like Sleep (The Orchard), starring Katherine Waterston as a widow who receives a disturbing phone call a year after the death of her husband (Michiel Huisman). Also starring Michael Shannon and Luke Evans, it’s in select theaters Friday and On Demand beginning Tuesday, following its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last year.

From China, the sequel to Xing Fei’s action-adventure film Mojin: The Lost Legend, Mojin: The Worm Valley (Well GO USA) once again follows tomb explorer Hu Bayi on a mission looking for the Tomb of Emperor Xian, which is located on an island filled with monsters. It will open in select cities.

James Brolin and Cybill Shepherd star in Rod McCall’s Being Rose with Shepherd playing Rose Jones, a widowed ex-cop who is diagnosed with a life-threatening health issue, so she decided to go on a road trip of the Southwest on her motorized wheelchair. In New Mexico she falls for an old cowboy, played by Brolin.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

The Metrograph has been doing late night screenings most of this year, but this weekend they make it official with Late Nights at Metrograph, running from Thursday through Saturday nights with this weekend starting out with Masaaki Yuusa’s appropriately-titled Anime Mind Game (2005). Things are getting a little more esoteric in the New Year (at least for me) with Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Future Life, Part 1, a retrospective of the Italian filmmaker’s works including Salo, Or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972) – the latter two of the three movies in his “Trilogy of Life” -- and more. I’ve heard of some of these but never seen any, so maybe that will change as this runs over the next two weeks. This weekend’s Playtime: Family Matinee is Barry Levinson’s baseball movie The Natural (1984), starring Robert Redford. On Saturday night, the Metrograph is also doing a special event, a screening of Godard’s 2010 film Film Socialisme presented by author Nico Baumbach.

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

Tarantino’s repertory theater kicks the year off with a number of double features with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 classic The Godfather. On Weds. and Thurs, it will double feature with The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971), while Friday and Sat. sees it paired with Richard Fleishcer’s The Don is Dead (1973).

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER (NYC):

You have to give the Film Society credit for being loyal to the filmmakers who regularly bring their works to the New York Film Festival, and in honor of Roma’s premiere there last year, this week begins Complete Cuaron, which is exactly what it sounds like showing all nine of Alfonso Cuaron’s films including Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, although it’s also a great chance to see Children of Men back on the big screen as well as seeing Gravity back in 3D.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

The Rated X series continues this weekend with a few repeat showings, plus the Quad is screening the 1991 film Van Gogh from the Cohen Film Collection. Also, the Quad will be showing a 30th anniversary rerelease of Isao Takahata’s anime Grave of the Fireflies.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

Hm… no new series announced yet for 2019… :(

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

Oscar-winning filmmaker Adam McKay gets a tribute this weekend with a double feature of Vice and The Big Short on Thursday, while Rob Marshall gets himself a triple feature on Friday with his musicals Mary Poppins Returns, Into the Woods and Chicago and Marshall there in person. (The American Cinemateque’s other theater, the Aero, is also showing fairly recent films rather than repertory ones.)

FILM FORUM (NYC):

Jacques Rivette’s banned 1966 drama La Religieuse (Rialto), starring Anna Karina, gets a 4k restoration, while this weekend’s Film Forum Jr. offering is Buster Keaton’s Three Ages (1923) with live piano accompaniment.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

Friday’s midnight offering is the classic 2001 Anime filmAkira.

MOMA (NYC):

New Year means a new series, and this week begins Modern Matinees: Sir Sidney Poitier with 1963’s Lillies of the Field(for which Poitier won the Oscar) on Weds, To Sir, With Love (1967) on Thurs. and Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967) on Friday.

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

The Astoria theater is beginning January with a series rescreening a Curator’s Choice of films from 2018 including Hereditary, The Rider and more.

That’s it for this week, but next week, there are three new movies in wide release, Sony’s A Dog’s Way Home, Keanu Reeves’ sci-fi thriller Replicas and the Bryan Cranston-Kevin Hart comedy The Upside.

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