Originally Posted by Devil's Cry (View Post) just the last 10-15 minutes would qualify.

mother! did not improve its lot over the weekend, as its $3 million opening day has led to a $7.5m opening weekend. For a $30m release with terrible word-of-mouth, that’s a pretty awful debut. That’s especially true as the film was Paramount/Viacom Inc.’s first of three would-be year-end prestige pictures, and mother! is thus-far getting better reviews on the festival circuit than George Clooney’s Suburbicon and Alexander Payne’s Downsizing. Although, reviews notwithstanding, I imagine those two will earn better Cinemascore grades, as mother! became among the few/the proud to snag an F from said audience polling service. Now, to be fair, you can make the case that Paramount released the decidedly divisive horror drama to be in the Darren Aronofsky business (Noah and Black Swan both made over $300m worldwide) and to also be in the Jennifer Lawrence business. Point being, absent Paramount’s larger issues, how much grief should we give the studio and the filmmakers for making/releasing a movie like mother! at a theater near you? Love it or hate it, and I’m in the “love it” camp, mother! is exactly the kind of bold, challenging, and unconventional genre fare we claim we want from Hollywood. It’s hard not to roll one’s eyes when you see countless folks complaining that Hollywood only releases sequels, comic book movies, cartoons and remakes and then watch those same folks utterly ignore mother! and/or decry the film’s very existence. Yes, Paramount sold the movie as something it’s not, but what exactly were they supposed to do? Marketing is about getting butts into the seat on opening weekend, period. Sure, there was deception involved, although in this interconnected age I can’t imagine how anyone could walk into a movie completely unaware of the general content. But if a studio needs to sell mother! like a haunted house movie, or if they need to give Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender their own overseas 12 Years A Slave poster, then that’s what happens. Everyone complained about that one back in late 2013, but the Oscar-winning Fox Searchlight release earned $131 million overseas, compared to $59m in North America. So obviously, the gambit worked. Paramount knew a platform release would be impossible due to word of mouth, so they did everything they could to inflate the opening weekend. It didn’t work, but there was no option B. And, to be fair, if mother! fled from October to September partially to get out of the way of Happy Death Day, Jigsaw and the second season of Stranger Things, then it also read headfirst into It, which is the kind of mega-smash that actively hurts the competition. Moreover, we can wonder to what extent the deluge of press which in-fact honestly discussed the film’s unique content and/or hinted at the onscreen madness did its job in letting folks know that it wasn’t their cup of tea. But the piss-poor audience polling implies that quite a few folks need to pay better attention to pre-release media. A completely fabricated story about Jennifer Lawrence arguing that the recent hurricanes were God’s punishment for us electing Donald Trump probably didn’t help, but that’s the kind of thing a studio can’t control in this clickbait age. Speaking of Lawrence, this is her worst wide release opening since she became a movie star after 2010’s Winter’s Bone. That it’s taken her seven years to have a mainstream bomb is impressive, although she spent much of that time in the protective cloak of The Hunger Games, X-Men, and David O. Russell ensemble dramas. Maybe the coming storm is why she signed on to X-Men: Dark Phoenix as a golden parachute. As much as folks would like to argue that the film’s failure is some kind of sign Lawrence is no longer a movie star, a movie like mother! is exactly the kind of thing on which you want big movie stars to spend their capital. Moreover, we should note that the film’s poor reception will not matter one bit to Javier Bardem, any more than Legend, The Drop and Child 44 winged Thomas Hardy’s would-be star power or the financial failures of Steve Jobs, The Light Between the Oceans and Song to Song did any damage to Michael Fassbender’s ability to get major lead roles. We may be entering Lawrence’s “In spite of everything you've done for them, eventually, they will hate you.” phase that greets almost every female Hollywood star. It was inevitable from the moment she became the current “It Girl” in late 2012 that eventually the backlash would ferment and folks would turn on her. This is the kind of crap that male movie stars like Daniel Craig, Ryan Gosling, Matthew McConaughey or Channing Tatum don’t have to worry about no matter how many flops they anchor. They aren’t classified in a “flavor of the month” fashion and there will always be a large supply of leading/supporting roles in the white male-dominated industry. I wish mother! had been embraced by the masses, but I am not surprised it wasn’t. The future cult classic has the honor of being the best movie ever to snag an “F” Cinemascore grade, all due respect to Killing Them Softly and Bug. If Julia Roberts can survive Mary Reilly (another intimate horror drama where the lead actress’s superb turn dominates nearly every frame of the film), then Lawrence can weather mother! IfA you’d rather Lawrence makes movies like Red Sparrow, then you damn well better see Red Sparrow in theaters next year. But mother! is the kind of bold artistic gambit that our biggest movie stars should making. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a movie star?

We live in an era of at-a-glance numerical assessment. Metacritic, CinemaScores, Rotten Tomatoes, box office opening weekend tallies are the metrics we check before buying a movie ticket. Too many consumers of film have become dependent on those numbers and wrongly assume that hitting the right score somehow equals greatness. For those who go to the movies for a comfortable fantasy that everything in life will work out fine, that the scrappy underdog will always prevail, and the bad guys always get caught, those favorable numbers are reassuring. They’re not interested in paying 12 bucks to be reminded of global warming or racism or violence against women. We each of us pick and prod our dioramas according to the movies and messages we seek, hoping to turn those stories into our ideal image of what best represents us — all of us — too often a purist ideal of what our society should be, but isn’t. But this strict adherence to conventional rules of culture or comforting narratives has resulted in an annual replay in Hollywood of sticking to what’s always worked before. Pre-awareness, branding, sequels, remakes. Movies play it safe again and again. Sometimes these sure bets make a ****-ton of money and are deemed a success. Sometimes they falter and don’t hit their mark. This summer, for instance, has the industry in a panic that their formula has failed. Maybe we need to reassess the risk of spent $150 million on a formula that used to work but now falters so often. Maybe it’s time to rethink the cynical attitudes of what audiences will buy into, and work harder to find new ways to risk those millions. Darren Aronofsky has made a film that required taking another sort of risk. He has earned that luxury, having proven his ability to make provocative films with modest budgets that can triple or quadruple their studio investment. Then came Black Swan, a high-Gothic psycho-thriller made for just $13 million and returning $329 million, which joined his finest films in making a mark on the cultural landscape. There are a lot of things you can say about Aronofsky’s latest high-risk endeavor mother! but not making its mark isn’t one of them. Of all of the films released so far this year this one probably has people talking in ways that movies used to inspire us to talk but really don’t anymore. Why? Because movies have become so expensive to make, they need to play it safe. So many critics on Rotten Tomatoes seem to judge movies like they might judge a new house: is it well built? Is it “even” or level or smooth? Does it include all the familiar necessities we expect? The more intellectual critics will allow for experimentation beyond that — after all, if a movie works, it works. I remember being a kid and people talking about films like The Exorcist that had people throwing up in aisles or running out of the theater. It’s been a long while since a movie made by a major Hollywood studio did that to audiences. It’s damned exciting to see it again. mother! took me places where studios once dared to go but rarely do anymore. Watching and absorbing this astonishing parable unfold, I had no idea what might to happen from moment to moment but I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. By the time events onscreen started to spiral beyond all sense or reason, I had no idea where I was even, or what the film was trying to tell me. But as it passed from the realm of what-the-hell-is-happening to my-god-this-cannot-be-happening, it became clear that Aronofsky was doing what he does so well, walking us through a horrifying dreamscape. To say mother! unfolds like a living nightmare on film is one way to see it, and perhaps another way is to realize humanity’s reign on our planet has been a living nightmare on Earth — with all the attendant beauty and devastation that has entailed. Even though he took us so far out there that we lose our bearings, Aronofsky miraculously holds it all together, partly by inserting overt signposts to guide us through it. In those symbols some see religion. Others saw a clash between the natural world and man’s effort to control it. Still others saw a dark rendition of an artist’s process, if not Aronfosky own life, perhaps the life of all artists, of any creator — or Creator. In the end, one of the most resonant messages I took from mother! is that women devotedly create life and men carelessly destroy it. After all, throughout the history of mankind, because men have held power to make civilization’s ominous decisions, most of the humans who have abused the environment, subjected animals to cruelty, and subjugated women have been men. (Yes, there are women who have been complicit in this and mother! shows us disturbing examples of those women too.) On the whole though, we know that most gun violence is committed by men; and wars are started by and fought by men. As for religion’s role in all this, whether God created Man in his image, or if the reverse is true — you can find arguments for each stance in mother! Mainly, I think the point needs be emphasized that art like this just doesn’t get made anymore on the scale that only filmmakers can do. So no matter our interpretations, no matter our judgments, we should celebrate its creation. We should feel lucky to have visionary directors like Aronofsky, and feel grateful to Paramount for standing behind his bold vision. We should be proud of Jennifer Lawrence for taking such a chance on a project so risky, all the more because she risked alienating her expectant fans by upending their expectations. I loved mother! myself. I know I will go back to watch it again and again. I loved Jennifer Lawrence in it. I loved the house. I loved Michelle Pfeiffer. I loved the sound design, of all things. To me it was a rich cinematic experience, a moving painting, unlike anything I have ever experienced before. How could anyone complain about that? Well, some have complained. The film has been hit with the rare “F” from the 400 or so indivduals surveyed by CinemaScore, and it earned less in its opening weekend that was hoped. (Having Breitbart lie as to stir controversy as it always does, and falsely claim that Jennifer Lawrence said this year’s hurricanes are Mother Nature’s wrath on Trump surely didn’t help ticket sales). But true movie lovers should feel confident that Aronofsky has given us something that people will be talking about for decades to come. I can promise you that. Movies like this don’t come around very often, not like they used to way back when. Art has the power to compel us to witness spectacles both beautiful and ugly. It has to power to make us think, inspire dreams, and give us nightmares. It has the power to challenge our perception of reality. So here’s to Darren Aronofsky and his wildly, brazen, primal creativity. And here’s to Paramount for saying **** it, let’s do this. And cheers to Jennifer Lawrence for helping to get it made on the clout of her profitable reputation. Let’s never forget that moviemaking should be so much more than a highly refined profit machine. Let’s forever be thankful that cinema can produce art like this.

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I've finished my fifth draft of the script with Jen in mind as the lead. It's a comedy called Life As Liz. PM if interested in hearing more about it. Or even possibly reading it.

I've also finished 15 full length original scripts. here is a blog for them.
http://kipsscripts.blogspot.com/