Categories
Movies

I saw a lot of movies this week and the best of them was HIDDEN FIGURES. It’s completely worthy of your time too.

Box office report: Hidden Figures repeats, La La Land surges

After captivating audiences to the tune of $22.8 million across its first weekend in wide release, Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures again rockets to the top of the domestic box office for the second week in a row, falling a slight 10 percent to an estimated $20.5 million.

The film’s take represents only the first three days of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday stretch, and will certainly climb higher into the mid-twenties when Monday figures roll in; its domestic total now stands at roughly $54.8 million on a reported $25 million budget, with no signs of stopping in the coming weeks as it translates its status as a top-earning crowd-pleaser into a prospective Oscar nominee.

Fellow awards player La La Land — which won a record seven Golden Globes last Sunday — surges with North American audiences, reaching a new peak at No. 2 with an estimated $14.5 million. Damien Chazelle’s modern musical, starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, averages around $7,846 per theater at 1,848 locations (including 148 IMAX screens) for a 43 percent increase over its three-day number last week, bringing its domestic haul to $74.1 million ($128.9 million globally) through Sunday, though Lionsgate is expecting the film to earn another $3 million on Monday. Regardless, La La Land will sit at the No. 13 spot on the all-time movie musical chart, surpassing 2014’s remake of Annie ($85.9 million) by the end of the coming week.

The latest Illuminations/Universal animated collaboration Sing spends its fourth straight weekend in the top three, finishing the three-day period with an estimated $13.8 million.

Hot on Sing‘s trail is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which posts a solid $13.76 million over its fifth weekend in theaters. This weekend, the film surpasses Finding Dory as the highest-grossing film to be released in 2016 with $498.9 million — a number that will exceed $500 million once Monday ticket sales are counted.

Among a relatively weak crop of newcomers, STX Entertainment’s The Bye Bye Man — a horror flick that marks Hollywood legend Faye Dunaway’s first major theatrical role in years — earns an estimated $13.4 million through Sunday, becoming the only new release to notch a spot among the weekend’s top five grossers. STX is expecting $15 million with holiday sales included, a total that more than doubles the film’s modest $7.4 million production budget. The Bye Bye Man hit largely with the distributor’s core demographic, attracting an audience comprised primarily of young women (61 percent were female, 75 percent were under the age of 25).

Outside the top five, a wealth of fresh or expanding titles fail to catch on with audiences. The third Mark Wahlberg/Peter Berg project, Patriots Day, debuts in wide release at No. 6 as the pair’s weakest opener yet, nabbing a soft $12 million for the three-day ($14.25 four-day). Still, the project — about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings — scores a rare A+ grade from polled moviegoers on CinemaScore.

Paramount’s Monster Trucks — made for an astronomical $125 million — takes in a paltry (but expected) $10.1 million ($14.1 million four-day) at No. 7, though it managed to pull off a stellar A grade on CinemaScore. The actioner, starring Lucas Till, Jane Levy, and Rob Lowe, attracted an audience base that was 60 percent under the age of 25, according to the studio. It opened in an additional 17 territories this weekend, earning around 34-37 percent more than the comparable Pete’s Dragon in Australia and Malaysia.

At No. 8, Jamie Foxx’s Sleepless takes in a so-so $8.5 million for the three-day, while Ben Affleck’s latest directorial effort Live By Night flops as it widens nationwide, amassing a lowly $5.4 million over the weekend.

Also premiering in wide release this weekend is Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Following a limited run that launched Dec. 23, Silence made $1.94 million over its first three days, which Paramount estimates will grow to $2.3 million by Monday’s end. The film, a passion project for Scorsese, was produced for around $45 million after nearly three decades of gestation.

Year to date box office is down approximately 4.2 percent from the same frame last year. Check out the three-day weekend box office estimates below.

1. Hidden Figures – $20.5 million
2. La La Land – $14.5 million
3. Sing – $13.81 million
4. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – $13.8 million
5. The Bye Bye Man – $13.4 million
6. Patriots Day – $12 million
7. Monster Trucks – $10.5 million
8. Sleepless – $8.5 million
9. Underworld: Blood Wars – $5.8 million
10. Passengers – $5.6 million

Categories
Music

It is such a classic album. One of my Desert Island Classics.

The Story of John Fogerty’s Lengthy Path to ‘Centerfield’

On January 16th, 1985, roughly a decade after he’d last released an album of new material, former Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman John Fogerty returned with his fourth solo LP, Centerfield. Happy as fans were to hear from him, everyone wanted to know the same thing: Where had he been?

As with anything that takes 10 years, Fogerty’s hiatus was due to a number of things – the first of which was the rejection of what was supposed to be his fourth solo outing, then titled Hoodoo, in 1976. Instead of leaning on him to deliver something better, Elektra chief Joe Smith told Fogerty to take his time and come back when he was ready – a stunning turn of events for a performer who’d always felt pressure, both internal and from his label, to churn out hit product on a regular basis.

“That was the greatest thing that ever happened,” Fogerty told BAM in 1985, acknowledging that Smith’s gentle rejection helped him get past what he deemed “a lot of problems.” As he put it, “The first thing I decided was I could take the time to have taste again, you know, the way it was before, when nothing came out until it was ready.”

Meanwhile, Fogerty found himself embroiled in a nasty, drawn-out legal war over Creedence Clearwater Revival’s legacy and the disbursement of contested royalties – a parade of lawyers and divided royalties that he admitted sent him spiraling into a terrible case of writer’s block.

“I would see these people’s faces in front of me, holding big bags of money they’d gotten from us, like a spectre, a hallucination,” he recalled. And although he ended up spending untold hours practicing in the studio – time he said helped him sharpen his chops considerably – he wasn’t sure where all that work would ever lead. “It was getting worse, more and more depressed, and further away from the center of John Fogerty. I could play but I didn’t know what to play. … A blind man in a fog, just flitting around.”

The song that ultimately snapped John Fogerty’s dry streak was ‘I Saw It on TV,’ a track that became a cornerstone of the nine-song Centerfield. Recalling that he’d “thought about this song for three or four years, with just a verse, and a smattering of melody,” he traced its watershed moment to a fishing trip that left him with a day of nothing but drifting and thinking on his hands.

“I quit about six o’clock in the evening and walked back to the car with maybe a verse-and-a-half and a chorus. I was starting to feel a little confident. And I got my fishing gear straight and shut the door in the car and CLICK – my brain said ‘Hey, I can do this!’ It felt like before, when I’d give myself that certain space and write ‘Proud Mary’ or whatever,” he continued. “I had jumped over the hurdle. I was a songwriter again. It was a great moment for me.”

That moment helped launch John Fogerty past a crucible that nearly warped his childhood dream beyond repair. “Our goal was to be like Elvis [Presley] or Little Richard in eighth and ninth grade, and we came up from El Cerrito and we succeeded, and we’re traveling around the world in Lear jets,” he pointed out. “And then suddenly I found myself chained to the dungeon wall, and I was cranking out little gems to pay for the cost of keeping a guard on my door.”

With “I Saw It on TV” under his belt, Fogerty was back in business as a songwriter, but that didn’t mean he was back to cranking out classics at the same speed he had during Creedence Clearwater Revival’s glory days. The album that would eventually become Centerfield came together slowly – partly due to Fogerty’s commitment to detail, and partly because he simply wasn’t sure what he should sound like anymore.

Finally, after toying with various approaches, he “drop-kicked the keyboards out the window” and more or less made his way back to where he started. Many critics pointed out that ‘Centerfield’ sounded a lot like a Creedence record. It’s a similarity that might have seemed like a cynical cop-out, if CCR’s rootsy approach was still paying dividends on the synth-coated Top 40 of the mid-’80s. But it actually served as a sign that after years of struggling to put it behind him, one of rock’s greatest songwriters was starting to come to terms with his past.

It was a slow process, however. “I knew it sounded like Creedence, and I wondered if Warners thought they were getting Michael Jackson or some modern synth-rock,” Fogerty later admitted. “I had to find out if I was working on the right thing. It was like in The Shining, when you think the guy is working on a book, but all he’s been doing is typing the same line over and over. I thought maybe I was out there somewhere, lost.”

If the label’s enthusiasm reinforced those first steps, then the public’s response to Centerfield took John Fogerty the rest of the way. A hit beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, the album rose all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, and sent leadoff single “The Old Man Down the Road” to No. 10 on the Hot 100. A follow-up, “Rock and Roll Girls,” hit No. 20; the title track, a No. 4 rock hit, stalled just outside the pop Top 40.

Initially, it seemed like the success of Centerfield might have signaled the opening of a creative logjam that could trigger a flood of new material approaching Fogerty’s legendarily prolific pace with Creedence Clearwater Revival; the following October, he followed it up with another solo effort, Eye of the Zombie. Unfortunately, that album led into another lengthy break that lasted nearly as long as the one before Centerfield – but this time, Fogerty had really started to make peace with his turbulent creative past, and begun to appreciate his own place in the rock firmament.

“There’s this guy buried there, and maybe some guy named Morris Stealum of Cheatem, Beatem & Whatever owns [his] songs in some big building in Manhattan,” Fogerty later mused in an interview with Rolling Stone, recounting a visit to Robert Johnson’s grave. Reminded of his own fight with Fantasy Records boss Saul Zaentz for control of his earlier songs, he couldn’t resist drawing a parallel – and a line in the sand.

“It’s Robert [Johnson] who owns those songs; he’s the spiritual owner of those songs. Muddy [Waters] owns his songs; Howlin’ Wolf owns his songs,” Fogerty pointed out. “And someday, somebody is gonna be standing where I’m buried, and they won’t know about Saul Zaentz – screw him. What they’ll know is if they thought the life’s work was valuable or not. Standing among all those giants, I went, ‘That’s the deal here. It’s time to jump back into your own stream.’”