Page 17 - Florida Sentinel 11-5-19

Entertainment
Box Office: ‘Harriet’ Nabs Promising $12 Million Weekend
The notion of a Harriet Tubman biopic has been a measuring stick of sorts for years and years, with the ab- sence thereof used as a prime example of Hollywood not valuing historically interesting or heroic black stories. That’s probably true, but now we have a Harriet Tubman biopic, from a black female filmmaker (Kasi Lemmons) no less. Yes, it’s a bit formulaic, borrowing the struture of Captain America: The First Avenger, but it’s a solid biopic/superhero origin story hybrid.
Cynthia Erivo is terrific and the film just works exactly as intended. Sometimes a good movie is a good movie. Any- way, I’m happy to note that au- diences seem to be showing up, with the film netting a solid $12 million opening weekend. That’s a promising 3.07x mul- tiplier from an A+ Cinemas- core grade. That’s not a barn burner but Focus Features will likely call it a measured win.
Warner Bros. released writer/director/producer/star
‘HARRIET’
Edward Norton’s Mother- less Brooklyn, a long-gestating passion project, into 1,342 the- aters. The $26 million adapta- tion of Jonathan Lethem’s novel stars Norton as a pri- vate investigator with Tourette’s trying to solve his mentor’s murder in the 1950s. Even with okay (but not su- perlative) reviews and a cast including Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alec Baldwin and Willem Dafoe, this is just the latest Warner Bros. drama to essen- tially call the bluff of moviego- ers who claim to want sophisticated, star-driven, adult-skewing studio pro- grammers.
Jamie Foxx Reveals Leonardo
DiCaprio Had Difficulty Saying
N-Word On ‘Django’ Set
A new Tarantino docu- mentary titled QT8: The First Eight features Jackson speaking about the contro- versy. The actor questioned why Tarantino often faces backlash while other filmmak- ers don't. "You take 12 Years a Slave, which is supposedly made by an auteur. Steve Mc- Queen is very different than Quentin,” Jackson report- edly said according to In- dieWire.
"When you have a song that says n*gger in it 300 times no- body says sh*t. So it’s ok for Steve McQueen to use [the n-word] because he’s artisti- cally attacking the system and the way people think and feel, but Quentin is just doing it to just strike the blackboard with his nails. That’s not true. There’s no dishonesty in any- thing that [Quentin] writes or how people talk, feel, or speak [in his movies]."
Also in the documentary is Django Unchained star Jamie Foxx who shared that
LEONARDO DICAPRIO
he had to reassure co-star Leonardo DiCaprio that no one would be offended if he said the n-word during film- ing. "Leonardo Dicaprio had a problem saying the word n*gger,” Foxx stated. "He said, 'It’s tough for me to say this.' I remember Samuel L. Jackson going, 'Get over it motherf*cker. It’s just another Tuesday motherf*cker.' I said, Leo we are not friends. This is your property, these aren’t hu- mans. This is your property. When Leo came in the next day, he didn’t speak [to me]."
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