C'mon Hollywood: What Happened To The "old School" Action Movie?

Monroe's photos for Prague exhibition stolen PRAGUE (AP) — A publicist for an upcoming Marilyn Monroe exhibition in Prague says that photographs of the star have been stolen. The collection of various items including Monroe's dresses, shoes, photographs and diaries was assembled by curators at the Salvatore Ferragamo museum in Florence, Italy last year to mark the 50th anniversary of Monroe's death.

Baz Luhrmann's high-society adaptation had little chance of surviving a box-office collision with the Fast & Furious franchiseThe winnerIt's not unusual for film franchises to hit their commercial stride with the second or third installment: Austin Powers and Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy are a couple of notable examples. But it's rare for a series to keep on building as it matures into its fourth, fifth and sixth episodes, as Fast & Furious has done. The first three films in the franchise all opened below £3m in the UK, before the fourth picture, confusingly called just Fast & Furious, debuted with a shade under £5m in 2009. Fast & Furious 5 pushed a little further two years later, kicking off with £5.33m, including £1.30m in previews. Now Fast & Furious 6 arrives, screaming out of the starting block with a stunning £8.72m. That's enough to make it already the third-biggest Fast & Furious film at the UK box office, behind only the fifth (£18.5m) and fourth (£13.7m) in the series.While the little-heralded original film The Fast and the Furious opened strongly in the US, stunning observers with its $40m debut in June 2001, it failed to repeat the trick in the UK three months later, hampered by landing in our cinemas just three days after the 9/11 terror attacks. Cumulative UK grosses for the first three pictures run as follows: The Fast and the Furious, £6.6m; 2 Fast 2 Furious, £7.7m; Tokyo Drift, £5.8m.Distributor Universal is reporting that the Fast & Furious 6 number is its biggest-ever three-day opening, and points out that it's also the biggest 2D opening of 2013 so far.Recent Fast & Furious films have opened over Easter weekend, delivering strong numbers and, in industry parlance, owning the date. May is traditionally when the top blockbusters of the year start arriving, and represents a time when rewards can be bigger, but competition fiercer. Universal took a gamble by grabbing the 17 May date, only a week after Star Trek Into Darkness, and facing off against The Great Gatsby, which admittedly is targeting a different audience. It's a risk that has handsomely paid off.The runner-upAfter one of the most highly visible publicity campaigns of recent times, some might be surprised to see The Great Gatsby so comprehensively overshadowed by yet another helping of auto mayhem. But Warner Bros will probably be pretty happy with its UK number: £4.10m, including previews totaling £676,000. By rule of thumb, that's slightly down on the US result: a $50m opening there would usually suggest a UK debut at around £5m. But it's still pretty healthy for a period literary adaptation or a film directed by Baz Luhrmann.Moulin Rouge opened in 2001 with £2.40m, and Australia followed in 2008 with £1.29m, achieved over the Boxing Day weekend. The Aviator – which, like The Great Gatsby, stars Leonardo DiCaprio and is set, initially at least, in the 1920s – took £1.31m from its first weekend of wide play in January 2005.Ignoring the Thursday previews, The Great Gatsby was in fact beaten into third place by Star Trek Into Darkness, which fell an acceptable 46% in its second frame, for an 11-day total of £15.6m. That's less than £6m behind the lifetime total of the previous Star Trek film, which maxed out here with £21.4m.The big fallersWith Fast & Furious 6 and The Great Gatsby providing tempting attractions to large and diverse audiences, it's no surprise to see existing pictures taking a tumble. Virtually every film fell by at least 50%, and some significantly more, exacerbated by plunging screen counts, as mature titles were tossed out of plexes to make way for the two big newcomers. Campus comedy 21 and Over fell an alarming 81%, while Gerard Butler actioner Olympus Has Fallen dropped 82%. Lionsgate will be plenty happy with the latter film, however, thanks to a gross so far of £6.1m.The alternativesSince The Great Gatsby is capable of playing arthouse cinemas as well as multiplexes, wooing an upscale and older crowd with the credentials of source material, cast and director, most independent distributors gave the date a miss, and will try their luck at a less competitive time. New releases were thin on the ground, and existing niche titles saw audiences shrink. In the circumstances, Jeff Nichols's Mud did well to fall by only 46%, while Pedro Almodóvar's I'm So Excited and Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines dropped 67% and 71% respectively. StudioCanal will be more than pleased with Pines' £3.3m total. In the US, it managed $20.6m, so a UK total just over £2m would be more expected.The futureThanks to the arrival of Fast & Furious 6 and The Great Gatsby, overall the market was 30% up on the previous weekend and 48% up on the equivalent frame from 2012, when Sacha Baron Cohen comedy The Dictator was the top new release. Now Wednesday sees the arrival of animation Epic, from Fox's Blue Sky Studios, the makers of the Ice Age movies. Epic has already played previews at the weekend, but these takings have not been officially reported, and will instead be added to the five-day opening, delivering a "weekend" figure made up of play on seven days. Then on Thursday, The Hangover: Part III lands, targeting a market that has been missing a major comedy for quite a while. Assuming strong holdover business from the current hits, the weekend should deliver another cash bonanza for cinemas.Top 10 films1. Fast & Furious 6, £8,717,534 from 462 sites (New)2. The Great Gatsby, £4,095,325 from 522 sites (New)3. Star Trek Into Darkness, £3,678,228 from 555 sites. Total: £15,553,7654. Iron Man 3, £1,400,462 from 457 sites. Total: £33,791,3445. All Stars, £196,579 from 359 sites. Total: £1,632,2106. Mud, £129,149 from 89 sites. Total: £506,2187. The Croods, £120,007 from 359 sites. Total: £25,718,7728. 21 and Over, £108,920 from 214 sites. Total: £2,321,4119. Olympus Has Fallen, £65,180 from 139 sites. Total: £6,131,19310. I'm So Excited, £45,728 from 54 sites. Total: £726,464Other openersAurangzeb, 37 sites, £27,938Rangeelay, 10 sites, £13,314Beware of Mr Baker, 11 sites, £10,356The Stoker, 1 site, £586• Thanks to RentrakUniversal PicturesBaz LuhrmannFilm adaptationsAction and adventureFilm industryCharles Gantguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn re-team for an emotionally breathtaking, aesthetically brilliant and immensely violent thriller set amongst US expatriates in BangkokIt may not win the Palme D'Or, but it could win the Walkout D'Or, a gold trophy of a cinema-seat banged up into the upright position. Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives is a glitteringly strange, mesmeric and mad film set among American criminal expatriates in Bangkok. It is ultraviolent, creepy and scary, an enriched-uranium cake of pulp, with a neon sheen. The first scenes made me think that Wong Kar-wai had made a new film called In the Mood for Fear or In the Mood for Hate.Ryan Gosling plays Julian, the co-owner of a Muay Thai boxing club with his brother Billy (Tom Burke): an operation which is a front for selling drugs. Both brothers are naturally angry and violent, though in keeping his feelings in check, Julian is of course by far the more unsettling. When Billy indulges his taste for violence and misogynist hate one night, and is himself murdered by his victim's father, Julian realises that he is expected to discharge the gangster's ultimate responsibility: revenge. But a twinge of conscience, or a twist of pain at the memory of those misdeeds which drove him from America in the first place, won't let him kill. This inability beings two terrifying people into his life and into the movie: one is Julian's mother Crystal, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, enraged at Julian's pathetic disloyalty. The other is the mysterious plainclothes police officer Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), who roams the streets armed with a sword: a sharia-samurai of justice. It is the impassive Chang who first discovered Billy's victim and for enigmatic reasons of his own, created the situation in which Julian found himself agonisingly incapable of that payback his mother expects. Chang could be a Zen master, whose vocation is to proselytise for the futility of revenge. He could be that god who insists that vengeance is solely his and only he will repay. Or he could be the ultimate sadist and tyrant, a Machiavel with a telepathic sense of how his victims are to be drawn into his power. Either way, Julian — clenched and unhappy in the three-piece suit he has put on for a dinner date with his mother, and never takes off — realises he has to challenge Chang to a fight. The film exerts an eerie and woozy grip from the outset, with many nightmarish scenes of people walking down long, claustrophobic corridors, somehow always pulsing with dark red and green light, like the subway in Gaspar Noé's Irrévrsible or the tenement corridor in Scorsese's Taxi Driver. There are some deeply disturbing karaoke club scenes, with crooning songs about unrequited love. (Winding Refn may also have taken something from the British film-maker Thomas Clay, and his Bangkok-set film Soi Cowboy.) Larry Smith's cinematography, and the art direction by Russell Barnes and Witoon Suanyai are staggeringly good. And however incredible this sounds, Only God Forgives has moments of great subtlety. When Julian has to go for dinner with his mother, he clearly anticipates it will be an occasion in which Crystal will pitilessly humiliate him about his cowardice and the size of his penis. So he brings along as his date the prostitute for whom he is a regular: Maï (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam). Maï's face shows how touched and moved she is when she realises Julian wants him to meet his mother — and then quietly, deeply wounded when Julian says that they must "pretend to be a couple". It is only Maï who emerges from the dinner, and indeed the movie, with any dignity and self-respect. There is another fascinating touch: when Chang is himself under threat, and must hit back against those tormentors employed by Crystal, he finds himself in what appears to be a cinema storeroom surrounded by reels of film, and will impose his violent authority on the manager, who is there with his boy. It is this boy who makes a strange, almost involuntary gesture with his hand towards his back, and a fraction of a second later we realise what is happening: Chang is about to unsling his sword. For some reason, I thought of the scene from Macbeth in which Banquo is slain in front of his child. Only God Forgives will, understandably, have people running for the exits, and running for the hills. It is very violent, but Winding Refn's bizarre infernal creation, an entire created world of fear, really is gripping. Every scene, every frame, is executed with pure formal brilliance. I'm afraid it's going to be even nastier the next time I watch it.Rating: 5/5Ryan GoslingNicolas Winding RefnBangkokPeter Bradshawguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

RADiUS - TWC is on a roll at Cannes, announcing today that the company has acquired North American rights to Keanu Reeves' directorial debut "Man of Tai Chai," days after nabbing the Directors' Fortnight thriller "Blue Ruin." Their Nicolas Winding Refn, Ryan Gosling-starring Palme d'Or contender "Only God Forgives" just premiered this morning at the festival. RADiUS has slated a fourth quarter 2013 release for Reeves' film. Set in modern Beijing, "Man of Tai Chai" film follows the spiritual journey of a young martial artist (Tiger Hu Chen) whose unparalleled Tai Chi skills land him in a highly lucrative underworld fight club.  As the fights grow tougher, he must compromise his own beliefs in order to survive.   Reeves stars in the film opposite Chen – a stuntman on "The Matrix" series who also trained him - in his first leading role, as well as up-and-coming international action stars Iko Uwais ("The Raid") and Jeremy Marinas.

Idris Elba is Nelson MandelaIt's a brave man who portrays a real-life figure who has already been played on screen by Morgan Freeman, but Idris Elba has no shortage of guts. After all, he's also the one aiming to cancel the apocalypse. He’s starring as Nelson Mandela in Long Walk To Freedom and after the Weinstein Company's reveal in Cannes the first poster is now online. {Long Walk To Freedom Poster}We don’t think any massive Kaiju make an appearance in this one, unless there’s something from his history that Nelson Mandela has really done well to hide. Instead the film, which takes its title from the main man’s 1994 autobiography, charts Mandela's childhood in a rural village, though his activist days and many years spent in prison, right up to his inauguration as democratically elected president of South Africa. So it’s definitely taking a different angle to Freeman and Clint Eastwood’s Invictus. A challenging role, sure, but one we suspect Elba will be well capable of handling - although he did call it "a massive performance piece" for him when we spoke to him recently.In this one, Naomie Harris – most recently seen in Skyfall – plays Winnie Mandela and Justin Chadwick is in the director’s chair, working from Les Miserables writer William Nicholson’s script.Of course, making a still image work is one thing. It remains to be seen how Elba does when actual footage arrives online, though for an initial reaction report to the trailer we saw in Cannes, click his way. The film itself arrives in the US on November 29, and is still awaiting a UK date.