box office duds

remember that thread we had a couple months back about "what if we made a movie where both the victim and the predator are unsympathetic so the audience doesn't know which to root for?" remember that the general consensus was that it probably wouldn't do well, because the audience would dislike both?
apparently we were wrong. - although that thread was about slasher movies, not psychodramas.

I don't really recommend it as a sleep aid, because it is relatively noisy and abrasive. - not in a Mad Max Fury road sort of noisy but in a neighbors arguing in the middle of the night sort of noisy.

It not quite the same at the start, in Gone Girl it seems like at the beginning one character is a sleaze and the other is an innocent, we gradually find out through the course of the movie not is all it seems. ironhold was suggesting what if we knew bad things where happening to people we knew where villians.

its been on Sky Movies already SD.

yeah, one is a sleaze and you only gradually learn the other is a psychopath.

It is a little pricey I guess but for access to sports and movies orth it to us.

I kind of liked Jupiter ascending in a "yeah, right, that's not believable - hey, brazil reference" kind of way.

American Ultra is now roadkill as well, making a mere $15.4m on a $28m budget.

Folks, I am laughing my fanny off right now.

For those of you who will remember, back in 2004 a little something called Memogate began to engulf the nation.

Staffers at CBS News were contacted by a man who claimed to have copies of documents produced by LTC Jerry Killian, President George W. Bush's commanding officer from when he served with the Texas Air National Guard. The documents alleged that Bush had not adequately fulfilled his military service obligations, but LTC Killian was under pressure from the higher-ups to conceal this fact. By all rights, producer Mary Mapes should have gone out of her way to verify the documents; after all, the bedrock of news media is "It's not what you can allege, but what you can prove."

That didn't happen.

The election was just two months away, and so Mapes decided to pounce on the story while it was still hot. To this end, she only gave the documents token scrutiny before she and anchor Dan Rather made the documents the focus of an entire episode of prime-time news show "60 Minutes". This came back to haunt the entire network, as even before the episode was over, document experts were going online talking about how they had reason to believe that the documents were actually clumsy forgeries made using a modern computer. The next morning, hundreds (if not thousands) of others, myself included, began to read these allegations. After examining both the allegations and CBS' presentation, we came to the conclusion that CBS News had grossly violated the tenets of proper journalism and started demanding accountability.

Although Mapes and Rather were absolutely insistent that the documents were the real deal and that Bush had received preferential treatment, CBS corporate heard our demands and launched an investigation. CBS confirmed that Mapes had, indeed, not conducted due diligence in ensuring that the documents were legitimate. Furthermore, she further violated her obligations by contacting the John Kerry election campaign about the matter before the special was set to air; this created the appearance of political bias, as it gave the impression that Mapes was attempting to coordinate the timing of the special with the campaign in order to discredit Bush. (In fact, the Kerry staffer she had spoken with had told her to quit calling him for this very reason.)

Mapes and several other individuals were fired outright, while Rather was forced into early retirement. To this day, however, they claim that even if the documents were fake, the story itself was real and that they were railroaded in order to keep the matter silent. Cue the film "Truth", which takes Mapes' claims of corporate persecution at face value. The film was released back on Friday (the 16th).

As of today (18 October 2015), it's presently sitting at #312 on Box Office Mojo's list of domestic takes for 2015. It's one notch above "Batkid Begins", and two pages below such irredeemable duds as "We Are Your Friends" (another Hollywood darling), "Blackhat", and "Mortdecai".

The critics, obviously, love the film if Wikipedia is to be believed. But if the trailers were any indication (I had to excuse myself from seeing it based on "conflict of interest" concerns; I saw "Goosebumps" instead), "Truth" doesn't contain one whit of it. And the general public, it seems, has spoken by avoiding it in droves.

Thanks.

Too busy laughing at "Truth".