Although The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 2 has the longer title and will likely be the number one movie over the weekend, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln has already garnered a lot of attention.
It opened in 11 theatres in North America last weekend, breaking a box office record for a limited release, so it is going to be interesting to see how well it does in more theatres, including its exclusive engagement at the Paramount Theatre
Lincoln has been a pet project for Spielberg for a decade and is based on only a part of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
Spielberg determined that Goodwin’s entire book was much too big for one film. The part the movie focuses on are the last four months of the president’s life and the political strategizing he undertook at the close of the Civil War to ensure that slavery would be forever outlawed.
Spielberg says the movie is about a working leader who must make tough decisions and get things done in the face of overwhelming opposition.
Critics are heaping praise on Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance as the 16th President of the United States and he seems to have a lock on an Academy Award nomination.
The rest of the cast is very impressive, including Sally Field as First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as son Robert Todd Lincoln, as well as James Spader, David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones and Hal Holbrook, who won an Emmy for his portrayal of Lincoln in a 1976 TV mini-series.
The aforementioned Twilight Saga is coming to an end this weekend with the release of Breaking Dawn—Part 2, but series creator Stephanie Meyer is not sitting on her laurels. She turns her attention from her book series about vampires and werewolves to her series about alien possession, producing the film adaptation of her sci-fi novel The Host.
Not being a fan of the Twilight movies, I was not terribly excited about this story about alien souls invading the minds of humans and in particular, an alien who inhabits the mind of a young woman. However, when I learned it was being adapted and directed by Andrew Niccol (who wrote and directed Gattaca and In Time and was Oscar-nominated for writing The Truman Show) and was starring Saoirse Ronan (The Lovely Bones and Hanna), I became much more interested. What could be the start of the next big series of movies, The Host is being released in March of next year.
In the meantime, we can celebrate (or put up with, depending on your point of view) the final movie in the Twilight Saga. The beginning of the end starts today at the Landmark Xtreme 8 with a marathon of all five movies starting at 12:30 p.m. today and showings of Breaking Dawn—Part 2 at 10 p.m. and 12:30 a.m.
I personally fall into the “put up with” category, but do have a certain love for the Twilight series—they have been good job security.
