The white submersible Lotus Esprit, which was featured in The Spy Who Loved Me was sold at auction for over $800,000. The sale came 24 years after the vehicle was found in a New York City storage container which sold for $100. The car is said to be fully functional in submarine mode but cannot be driven on land.
In the movie, Bond drives the Lotus off a pier into the ocean as he tries to evade a pursuing helicopter, which he eventually destroys. The Lotus then emerges from the sea on a beach and drives away.
The Lotus Submarine Car, although pricey, was not the most valuable Bond car, that goes to the 1964 Aston Martin DB5 used in Goldfinger and Thunderball, which sold for $4.6 million.
Cinema Posts Record Summer
Even with a few mega-flops the U.S. summer box office, which ended on Labor Day, made a record $4.7 billion. The studios packed the summer with big-budget blockbusters that ranged from hugely successful films to major bombs. In all, the summer box office saw a 10.2% increase over last year, with attendance up 6.6%.Moviegoers had a line-up of one-after-the-other big budget films which meant faster turnover which may have actually hurt some films. The biggest summer hit was Disney's Iron Man 3, which earned $409 million domestically and $1.2 billion worldwide. Despite successes, Disney lost big on The Lone Ranger which grossed only $88 million but cost $215 to produce. Other bombs included: Turbo, After Earth, White House Down, The Wolverine, and The Hangover Part III.
Hollywood studios consider the summer months to be primetime, when the audiences are the widest. Several low and medium budget comedy and horror films did very well, including The Conjuring and The Purge, as did the summer's top comedy film, The Heat. It was interesting to note that the top six summer films were all sequels or part of existing franchises.
The high cost of marketing a movie, which can rival or surpass production costs, makes it likely that the studios will continue to increasingly depend on high-impact action movies and teen fare during the summertime.
The box office is as unpredictable as ever, where sure things - like Will Smith in After Earth or Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger - do not always spell success, while a low-budget movie, like The Heat, can make tens of millions.
R2D2 Spotted in Star Trek Movies
It was the final frontier, as far as die-hard Trekkies are concerned, as R2D2 the dome shaped robot of Star Wars films, was spotted in a second Star Trek movie.
First seen briefly in the 2009 movie Star Trek, R2 has now showed up in the latest film in the Star Trek saga, Star Trek Into Darkness, where the small droid can be seen being sucked into space (one hour and 17 minutes into the feature). Trek bloggers and fans blasted Into Darkness and voted it the worst Star Trek movie ever at their annual Vegas convention held last month. One blogger wrote, "Star Trek is not Star Wars. Trek and Wars come from two totally different places. One is thoughtful serious fiction, the other, a mash-up of Westerns, Asian action films, and '30s serials." We can guess which one he thinks is a mash up.
Bedtime Stories Get 'Stressed Out'
A recent poll commissioned by Littlewoods, the clothing and houseware retailer, found that only 13% of parents read to their children each night. What use to be the way a parent and child bonded at the end of each day is pretty much gone. No more 'Cat in the Hat', Grimm tale, or Snow White parents say they are too 'stressed out' and 'tired' to read to their kids.
Of the 2,000 mothers polled with children 0-7, only 64% said they had ever read bedtime stories, although 94% responded they were regularly read stories when they were young. Further, only 13% of the respondents read a story every night, which was surprising since 87% believed that bedtime reading is 'vital' to children's education and development.
The poll discovered that 9% of parents feel "too stressed" to read bedtime stories and 13% admitted they did not have the time. Nearly 50% of the mothers said their kids found television, computer games, and other toys more diverting, while 4% said their children do not own one book!
My take. Children lose imagination without stories. They become lackluster thinkers.
Jim Lavorato
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