Weekly Box Office and Film Discussion Thread

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Drtooth

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mr3urious said:
Being a Canadian co-production, it was real cheap to produce due to all the tax write-offs the production got. Great news for R-rated animation as a whole, but I'd much rather see more animated dramas get made, like A Scanner Darkly.
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The movie would have to have been a cheap to produce film, as the only R rated animated movies in "recent" years to be made were Beavis and Butt-head and South Park. Two already hit shows that were mostly sold by the fact they were able to deal with movie censorship instead of television censorship.

There was a rich history of X-rated animated films in the 70's. They weren't exactly good...maybe the first Fritz the Cat if you like your Ralph Bakshi more than your R. Crumb. Personally, I'd rather see more animated action R rated films like Heavy Metal and Rock n' Rule (if they were indeed R rated, I'm afraid to admit I forget if Rock was). Again, I want to see the American equivalent of Golgo 13 or Goku Midnight Eye. Of course, I also want to see an adult action animated TV show. Close we're getting is the Samurai Jack continuation.
 
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So I saw Sausage Party on a bargain Tuesday showing. It's actually quite good if you're inclined to liking that sort of thing. I'd say it definately blows the other non-preexisting TV Show property animated R rated film (as in South Park, Aqua Teen, and Beavis and Butt-head) out of the water, but...let's face it. It's not much of a competition. It's certainly funnier than a meh Family Guy episode from 2006 or so, or most of Robot Chicken (which could have done a weaker, shallower concept in a short skit). Billions of times better than when one of the other stars had a cartoon.

There's things I really liked about this film, and one of them was the ironic racist caricatures. What would strike me otherwise is that it's the kind of Family Guy offensiveness for offensiveness's sake that's more tasteless than mean spirited, but you somehow manage to get a laugh out of it because they cross the line just enough times for it to be funny and chances are the jokes are written by the group that's supposed to be offended.

It would had it not been for Cars.

As in, the magic bus is a caricature of hippy, the tow truck is a caricature of a redneck, the Japanese car reporter had anime eyes, the Fiat and his assistant are Italian from Italy stereotypes... etc. Yeah. You can't tell me that the strange caricatures in Sausage Party weren't at least inspired by that.

All in all, not a bad film. The jokes are just skirting gratuitous and juvenile, but the film goes into deep existential stuff about religion, as well as being a deconstruction of Pixar type films (Toy Story in particular).

oh...edit:

There is one thing that totally bugged me about one scene in the film:

They could totally have a hailstorm of cussing and show graphic sex puns...yet don't you DARE have a graphic scene of a human getting decapitated. Somehow that's where they drew the line
 
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mr3urious

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I don't think that Ben-Hur remake is going to succeed, even though there are almost exclusively practical effects being used, which I greatly commend the director for using. Those last couple of Ancient Grome movies released in years past haven't been the biggest of hits with moviegoers.

I hope Kubo succeeds on the merit of being a more kid-friendly alternative to Sausage Party. Laika desperately needs a big break in the domestic box office.
 
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Kubo has a Burger King kid's meal tie in, so at least it's more approachable. It really stinks that Laika's movies are so underappreciated until they hit home video of some kind. They really seem to be killing themselves with these great practical effects when even the cheapest of CGI films opens bigger. Maybe it's just the timing with these. August rarely opens good with the exception of the surprise success of 2 super hero based films.
 
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UGH! Spoke too soon. Now I can barely even find Kubo, even at two of the three theaters I frequent.

But there's still room in one of them for Dinesh D'Souza's "masterpiece" about how terribly Hillary is because the Democratic party was racist at some point. CLEARLY made before the opposing party's nominee, thus making the film even more hypocritical, petty, and disgusting.

And I'm in a &^%$in' "blue" state.

Seriously. There's room for a terrible crayon scribbled manifesto, but not a lovingly made masterpiece that should be seen by every animation fan out there. Nice job.

If terrible distribution is to blame for Laika's problems, they need to find someone else.
 
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If the case is poor distribution like mine, I'm not surprised. Poor timing as kids who aren't already in school or about to go back and have no time to see movies is also a factor. But I swear... there's no love for stop motion movies anymore. I'm sick of seeing Laika's films underperform. Even the crappy Ice Age 5 no one saw got more views. It's a real shame their films are only appreciated by animation geeks, and then they hit when they're on deep discount home video.

That said, I didn't get to see it over the weekend either. Hopefully it's still there next weekend.
 
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It sounds a little vague about Chris Evans and his roles in the films. It just sounds like Civil War was a natural write off point for the character, and an instrumental plot point for the MCU. I'd imagine that the huge fight with Iron Man was written to be the character's point of conflict of which he'd leave the Avengers. I could see Chris Evans coming back as just Steve Rogers in cameo form, but it's a great opportunity to get more Avengers into the film series. Spidey's clearly coming back at some point, there are a lot of other characters the can introduce. And we're just one Ant-Man sequel away from Wasp being part of the team.
 
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