Latino movie news, reviews, trailers, and festival coverage

‘Lakeview Terrace’ is #1 at the box office

“Lakeview Terrace” (Sony/Screen Gems), the new thriller starring Samuel L. Jackson as a policeman terrorizing his new neighbors, Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington, earned $15.6 million, ousting the Coen brothers’ “Burn After Reading” from first place at the box office over the weekend, according to estimates from Media by Numbers, a box office tracking firm. “Burn After Reading” (Focus Features), starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, slipped to second place with earnings of $11.3 million. It has made $36.4 million in two weeks. New releases grabbed third and fourth positions: “My Best Friend’s Girl” (LionsGate), the romantic comedy starring Kate Hudson, Dane Cook and Jason Biggs, earned $8.3 million and the animated comedy “Igor” (MGM) was close behind with $8 million. “Righteous Kill” (Overture Films), the action film starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, took fifth place with $7.7 million for the weekend and $28.8 million in two weeks. Over all the weekend was relatively weak with revenues of $93 million, 4 percent lower than the same weekend last year.

The Box-Office Top Five

#1 “Lakeview Terrace” ($15.6 million)
#2 “Burn After Reading” ($11.3 million)
#3 “My Best Friend’s Girl” ($8.3 million)
#4 “Igor” ($8 million)
#5 “Righteous Kill” ($7.7 million)

Sex and the City: The Movie will have a part 2

Where to celebrate the launch of the Sex and the City: The Movie DVD?

Why, the same place where, in the film, Carrie Bradshaw gets stood up at the altar. Thursday night, the film’s stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall and Cynthia Nixon reconvened at the New York Public Library, which was lit up in pink and decorated with a custom-made interlocking-C white Chanel couch.

A radiant and friendly Parker, in Alexander McQueen, said she was ecstatic that her film was one of the year’s blockbusters. “I was surprised and thrilled and gratified and shocked,” said Parker. “I think we felt very honored that people connected to the story.”

Said Cattrall: “This has been an amazing year. It’s poignant that the year after we started shooting, the DVD is coming out. It just seems to get better.”

And now, word is, there’s a sequel in the works.

If a second installment of Sex comes to fruition, Parker wants it to “be thoughtful and something that has some meaning — (we want) to tell a good story and produce it well.”

Cattrall too hopes it happens. “The deal is they’re making the deal and Michael Patrick King is writing the script. I don’t envy him that task. I’m very excited because Samantha is single and that’s real fun to play,” she said.

Lakeview Terrace

Rated: PG-13 for intense thematic material, violence, sexuality, language and some drug references.
Release Date: 2008-09-19
Starring: David Loughery, Howard Korder
Director(s):
Distributor:
Film Genre:
Country: USA
Official Website: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/lakeviewterrace/

Go to our film page

Lakeview Terrace is the latest thriller from Neil LaBute. LaBute began his filmmaking career with the scathing In the Company of Men, but his previous effort was the deservedly reviled remake of The Wicker Man. While Lakeview Terrace isn’t as horrendous as The Wicker Man, it’s nowhere close to the level LaBute attained with his debut. The first two-thirds of Lakeview Terrace offer a little more subtlety and complexity than the seemingly straightforward premise would afford, but the climax is loud, dumb, generic, and over-the-top. Those hoping for something more interesting will be disappointed by the level to which the filmmaker stoops to get an unearned visceral rush. In pandering to Hollywood standards about how stories like this should unfold, LaBute has lost his edge.

The story goes like this: a young couple (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) has just moved into their California dream home when they become the target of their next-door neighbor, who disapproves of their interracial relationship. A stern, single father, this tightly wound LAPD officer (Samuel L. Jackson) has appointed himself the watchdog of the neighborhood. His nightly foot patrols and overly watchful eyes bring comfort to some, but he becomes increasingly harassing to the newlyweds. These persistent intrusions into their lives ultimately turn tragic when the couple decides to fight back.

The film’s last fifteen minutes are so over-the-top that they’re almost impossible to take seriously and Abel’s motivation during a critical sequence near the conclusion is difficult to fathom. It’s the kind of thing that results from a screenwriter not knowing how to end a movie. Considering that the screenwriter in question is David Loughery, the man who was in part responsible for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Meanwhile, Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington are okay as the couple in the crossfire but, in comparison to Jackson, they’re boring. That’s the problem with sharing the screen with a man who’s a force of nature.

There are times when Lakeview Terrace seems to be striving for something more interesting than the basic “cop from hell” movie, but any pretensions it may have of escaping this orbit come crashing down as the script veers more and more into generic territory. Going in, you might think you know how it’s going to end, and you’d probably be right. If LaBute sews some doubts along the way, it’s a testament to the way the first half of the film is constructed. It’s too bad the movie’s moderately intriguing qualities are buried under the final half-hour’s avalanche of predictability.

Diego Luna at the JC Chavez premiere in Los Angeles

ESPN Deportes sponsored a special screening of JC Chavez, Diego Luna’s directorial debut at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF), on Monday, September 15, 2008 at the Mann Chinese 6 Theater in Hollywood, California. The film recounts the struggle and success of Julio Cesar Chavez, a national hero from humble beginnings in Culiacan, Mexico to the ultimate boxing superstar.
 
ESPN Deportes and ESPN Classic will premiere JC Chavez on Saturday, September 27 at 10:00 p.m. EST/ 7:00 p.m. PST as part of the network’s Hispanic Heritage Month programming line-up.  The film will also be available on DVD starting September 30 for an SRP of $19.95, distributed by ESPN Home Entertainment. In addition, Netflix will offer the film for digital download.

In pic: Eric Conrad, Director of Programming and Acquisitions ESPN Deportes, Gerardo Quirama, Associated Manager Strategic Programming Planning ESPN Deportes and Diego Luna, Director of JC Chavez.

Frank Mundus, 82, Dies; Inspired ‘Jaws’

Frank Mundus, the hulking Long Island shark fisherman who was widely considered the inspiration for Captain Quint, the steely-eyed, grimly obsessed shark hunter in “Jaws,” died on Wednesday in Honolulu. He was 82 and lived on a small lemon-tree farm in Naalehu, on the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii, 2,000 feet above shark level.

The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Jeanette, said.

Mr. Mundus and his wife moved from Montauk, on the South Fork of Long Island, to Hawaii in 1991, but often returned to Long Island in summer, when tourists and city-slicker enthusiasts sought to spice vacations with a shark hunt, priced at $1,800 for a party of five.

On just such a venture in August 2007, the tail of a nine-foot thresher shark splashing off the stern of his 42-foot boat, the Cricket II, slapped Mr. Mundus and sent him reeling. He struck right back, planting his gaff — a giant fish hook on a pole — in the shark’s back and hauling it aboard.

Mr. Mundus had run charter boats from the docks of Montauk since 1951, taking fishermen out for easy-to-catch mackerel and fighting bluefish. But one night in the 1950s, according to one of his accounts, sharks outnumbered the blues and in the ensuing struggle a shark was snared. The next day Mr. Mundus posted a sign by his boat: “Monster Fishing.”

Mr. Mundus inevitably became known as Monster Man, and he looked the part, with his safari hat, a diamond-studded gold earring, a jewel-handled dagger with a shark-tooth blade, and the big toe of one foot painted green and the other red, for port and starboard.

His most fateful encounter with a shark came one day in 1964, when Mr. Mundus already had two sharks hanging on the side of his boat and a third on the hook. Then he spotted a huge one alongside.

“I harpooned him and he took off for the horizon,” he told The Daily News in 1977. “Before I got him, I harpooned him five times. A white shark. A killer. He was 17 ½ feet long and 13 feet in girth and weighed at least 4,500 pounds. The biggest ever caught.”

The legend grew, and in the next few years, he repeatedly took Peter Benchley, who wrote the best seller “Jaws,” out to sea.

Mr. Mundus told a New York Times reporter that Mr. Benchley loved the way he harpooned huge sharks with lines attached to barrels to track them while they ran to exhaustion.

In 1975, “Jaws” was turned into Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie, which for years left millions of beachgoers toe-deep in the sand. Robert Shaw played Quint, who exits by sliding feet first into the belly of a monster great white.

Mr. Benchley, who died in 2006, denied that Mr. Mundus had been the inspiration for Quint, whom he described as a composite character.

Clearly irked, Mr. Mundus said: “If he just would have thanked me, my business would have increased. Everything he wrote was true, except I didn’t get eaten by the big shark. I dragged him in.”

In 1986, Mr. Mundus dragged in a 17-foot-long, 3,427-pound great white — not by harpoon, but by rod and reel, quite a feat for a man with a withered left arm.

Frank Louis Mundus was born in Long Branch, N.J., on Oct. 21, 1925, a son of Anthony and Christine Brug Mundus. He broke his arm as child and a bone-marrow infection set in, leaving that arm shorter than the other. By then, the family had moved to Brooklyn, where Mr. Mundus’s father found work as a steamfitter and his mother ran a boarding house. Doctors told Mr. Mundus’s parents that they should take him to the beach to swim to build strength in his arm.

“He fell in love with the ocean,” his wife said.

Besides his wife, the former Jeanette Hughes, whom he married in 1988, Mr. Mundus is survived by his sister, Christine Zenchak; three daughters from a first marriage, Barbara Crowley, Theresa Greene and Patricia Mundus; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. His first marriage, to Janet Probasco, ended in divorce.

Mr. Mundus dropped out of high school and got a job as a freight handler. Soon after, however, the pull of the sea had him working on charter boats for $3 a day. By 1951, he had his own boat, the Cricket, and was sailing out of Montauk Harbor. He named his boats after Jiminy Cricket because people told him that with his sloping forehead and Roman nose, his profile looked like the character in the film “Pinocchio.” Although Mr. Mundus caught hundreds of sharks during his career, he became something of a conservationist in later years. He promoted the use of circle hooks, which catch in the jaw, not the gut, increasing a shark’s chances of survival if it escapes or is released. He also helped start a shark-tagging program and voiced support for catch-and-release fishing.

As it turns out, Mr. Mundus did not think much of “Jaws.”

“It was the funniest and the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen, because too many stupid things happened in it,” his Web site says. “For instance, no shark can pull a boat backwards at a fast speed with a light line and stern cleats that are only held in there by two bolts.”

"Burn After Reading" burns the competition

‘Burn After Reading’ – 7 clips from the movie

We bring you 8 scenes to see from the Coen Brothers new film comedy thriller, Burn After Reading starring Clooney, Pitt, McDormand, Sledge Hammer (remember him?) and Malkovich. Here is your chance to see if their dark comedy is your cup of tea. Click on the video and decide if it’s for you.

Basically, the premise is A dark spy-comedy about an ousted CIA official’s (Academy Award nominee John Malkovich) memoir accidentally falls into the hands of two unwise gym employees (Pitt and McDormand AA winners too) intent on exploiting their find.

Also, if you would like to se our film review, and check out the 5 posters of the film along with a bevy of photos, video and more, click here.