Surviving the Post-Oscar Hangover

It’s April, and as is customary, the films at the box office are dismally mediocre. Let’s take a look at the top movies at the box office for April 10-12, 2015. After each movie, I have also provided the IMDb metascore and the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer:

1. Furious 7 ($59.6 million, IMDb: 67, Rotten Tomatoes: 82%)
2. Home ($18.5 million, IMDb: 55, Rotten Tomatoes: 47%)
3. The Longest Ride ($13 million, IMDb: 32, Rotten Tomatoes: 29%)
4. Get Hard ($8.2 million, IMDb: 34, Rotten Tomatoes: 29%)
5. Cinderella ($7.1 million, IMDb: 67, Rotten Tomatoes: 85%)
6. Insurgent ($6.7 million, IMDb: 42, Rotten Tomatoes: 31%)
7. Woman in Gold ($5.5 million, IMDb: 51, Rotten Tomatoes: 53%)
8. It Follows ($1.9 million, IMDb: 83, Rotten Tomatoes: 95%)
9. Danny Collins ($1.5 million, IMDb: 58, Rotten Tomatoes: 78%)
10. While We’re Young ($1.4 million, IMDb: 76, Rotten Tomatoes: 85%)

There’s nothing too compelling in this group. Furious 7 has captivated the weekend audience most obviously due to the high intensity and action, and many people want to make a pilgrimage out of saying their final goodbyes to Paul Walker. Cinderella and Insurgent are both on a downswing after being in the theaters for a while, and Get Hard was a colossal disappointment.

It Follows and While We’re Young are the only critically notable appearances remaining, but it might be hard to find them on a limited release.

If you’re like me, you are waiting for the summer blockbusters and subsequent fall releases that occupy our mental countdowns throughout most of Spring. The following titles come to mind: Avengers: Age of Ultron, Tomorrowland, Spy, Jurassic World, Inside Out, Ted 2, Ant-Man… the list goes on.

Until then, we have to twiddle our thumbs and maintain patience as much as we can. In the meantime, here are some movie trivia facts you might not have known:

1. Pulp Fiction (1994): Uma Thurman originally turned down the role of Mia Wallace. Quentin Tarantino was so desperate to have her as Mia, he ended up reading her the script over the phone, finally convincing her to take on the role.
2. The Dark Knight (2008): While filming the chase scene with the Joker and the SWAT vans, one of only four IMAX cameras in the world at that time was destroyed.
3. Fight Club (1999): In the short scene when Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are drunk and hitting golf balls, they really are drunk, and the golf balls are sailing directly into the side of the catering truck.
4. Star Wars: Episode V (1980): With the exception of being sucked out of a Cloud City window, Mark Hamill did all of his own stunts.
5. Forrest Gump (1994): Tom Hanks wasn’t paid for the film. Instead he took percentage points which ultimately netted him in the region of $40 million.
6. Inception (2010): If you take the first letters of the main characters’ names – Dom, Robert, Eames, Arthur, Mal and Saito – they spell “Dreams”. If you add Peter, Ariadne and Yusuf, the whole makes “Dreams Pay”, which is what they do for a mind thief.
7. The Matrix (1999): In the first 45 minutes of the film, Neo (Keanu Reeves) has 80 lines. 44 of these lines are questions, just over half of his total dialogue, averaging at roughly one question per minute.
8. Interstellar (2014): For a cornfield scene, Christopher Nolan sought to grow 500 acres of corn, which he learned was feasible from his producing of Man of Steel (2013). The corn was then sold and actually made a profit.
9. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): During filming in Tunisia, nearly everyone in the cast and crew got sick, except director Steven Spielberg. It is thought that he avoided illness by eating only the food he’d brought with him: cans and cans of Spaghetti-O’s.
10. Gladiator (2000): Over the course of the gladiatorial scenes, Russell Crowe broke bones in his foot and his hip, and injured both bicep tendons.
11. Back to the Future (1985): From the day the film wrapped to the day it was released was a mere nine and a half weeks, an unprecedentedly short lead time for a major movie release.
12. Alien (1979) :Shredded condoms were used to create tendons of the beast’s ferocious jaws.
13. The Lion King (1994): The wildebeest stampede took Disney’s CG department approximately three years to animate. A new computer program had to be written for the CG wildebeest stampede that allowed hundreds of computer generated animals to run but without colliding into each other.
14. The Shining (1980): There were so many changes to the script during shooting that Jack Nicholson claimed he stopped reading it. He would read only the new pages that were given to him each day.
15. Braveheart (1995): Several of the major battle scenes had to be re-shot, as extras were seen wearing sunglasses and wristwatches.
16. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975): Funds earned by Pink Floyd‘s album “The Dark Side of the Moon” went towards funding The Holy Grail. The band were such fans of the show they would halt recording sessions just to watch Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969).
17. Scarface (1983): Oliver Stone wrote this film while fighting a cocaine addiction.
18. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013): Margot Robbie claimed that her sex scene with Leonardo DiCaprio on a bed full of cash was extremely uncomfortable, as the fake paper bills had sharp edges resulting in multiple paper cuts to her back.
19. The Big Lebowski (1998): A lot of the Dude’s clothes in the movie were Jeff Bridges‘s own clothes, including his Jellies sandals.
20. The Princess Bride (1987): When asked what his favorite thing about making this film was, André the Giant replied, without skipping a beat, “Nobody looks at me.” He felt treated as an equal, without people staring at him because of his grand height.

Source: IMDb

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