The Roundup with Jeff Stockton (Season 29 Round 5)

 

 

Through the first half of Season 29, box office numbers have been a bit low even if the majority of films have been profitable. Here's The Roundup....

3. Soundtracks

This is a good season for soundtracks. Voters will have plenty choose from come GRA season. This season has already featured seven films with soundtracks, and I believe there will be at least a few more, giving us our first season with double-digit soundtracks since Season 23.

2. Robert Downey Jr.

RDJ is having a serious comeback the last couple of seasons in LRF. He was nominated for both performances last season and I think he has a serious chance of more GRA nominations this season for his role in Under the Influence.

1. Under the Influence

I really enjoyed Andrew Dominik's long awaited return to LRF screens. Chad Taylor's script created very vivid characters that picked up slack when the plot occasionally got messy. I think this one will be a serious GRA contender in the acting categories.

3. Box Office

Things haven't been great at the box office lately. There hasn't been a legitimate box office since the beginning of Round 3. Films have been mostly profitable, but not by a whole lot, leaving the profit margins slim.

2. The Woman Upstairs

The ending of the story was not very rewarding and the casting outside of Anne Hathaway and Sofia Boutella was not great. Mark Ghanime gave a lifeless, Lifetime-level performance. Kaylen Luke does not appear to even be the correct ethnicity for his part, making for a distracting addition to the cast. Back to the ending, it felt like things were just starting to get going when the film just kind of ended on a weird note. I'm sure that's how the novel ended, but it didn't work on film.

1. The Dark Tower Franchise

For years fans have been saying the a big budget TV series was the only way to capture Stephen King's Dark Tower series of novels on film, and after four films I am starting to think those fans were right. Each book does not tell its own complete story, which is setting the films up for failure if the filmmakers don't work on adapting things in a different fashion.