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August 31, 2006
Embargoing Too Far?
In the course of his regular schtick of calling out quote whores, UGO's Erik Childress does a much more interesting piece on the status of The Embargo in Hollywood these days.
His perspective, from Chicago, causes him to make a few missteps in his opinion sifting. And that’s understandable.
For instance, his memory is accurate and inaccurate on Siskel & Ebert. The rule was, indeed, that they didn’t go early with any title unless they were two thumbs up. But they also tended not to go early unless there was a hole in the schedule somewhere. This changed a few years ago when the TV show (Ebert & Roeper) started pursuing first-look opportunities on a weekly basis, even setting a graphic design for their “scoops.”
There is a big change there. One of choice, not circumstance.
Childress also rips into the trades, using my quote, “The notion in the past was that the trades were doing a service of sorts inside the industry,” as a cudgel.
Well, he took it somewhere beyond what is reasonable. The reason the trades reviewed first was never because they were sure to be “helpful” or even because their box office predictions were always right. But the subscription base of 40,000 or so people for each trade was the entire readership. They were, in the real meaning of the term, trade magazines. They weren’t on wire services and there was no Rotten Tomatoes or blogs to spread the gospel of Todd & Kirk. Those reviews were for "the family."
There is a specific imbalance in Chicago review policies because of the power of Ebert. The Chicago Tribune gets to ride on his coattails because the studios don’t want to piss that massive paper off. But the truth is, if Ebert wasn’t there to force the early screenings, there would only be the late screenings or very, very strict embargoes.
If anyone tells Erik or anyone else that they have to embargo any movie that they have seen at a festival, there is nothing to do but to laugh in their face. A festival is a paid public screening. Period. (We did have some debate last year about whether the Butt-Numb-A-Thon was a festival, after The Hollywood Reporter reviewed a film out of that event this year to the studio’s surprise.)
For the sake of clarity, I will print the entire paragraph that I will object to one part of:
“In an August 16 column this year about embargoes, David Poland writes: “For the record, only about 20% of movies I see earlier than most other short lead press are of the "if you like it, write… if not, hold" variety. About 30% have no rules at all. And about 50% are movies on which I have to hold no matter what because of studio concerns about the trades launching their reviews because I have run mine, or because the studio has a specific hold arrangement with the trades or others, or because they have withheld the film from the trades until they can see it at a festival.” Interesting statistics that help support Poland’s ability to blast Richard Corliss and Time Magazine for running pre-release “feature” reviews (where Corliss’ thoughts about the film are placed within a bubbly piece about the production) and then do the same thing himself with positive reviews of Miami Vice and World Trade Center two weeks early and School for Scoundrels a full month in advance.”
I think it is fair to question how I am handled by studios. And Childress neither knows or asks about the dozen or so films I am currently embargoed on or, for that matter, the movies I am not embargoed on, but am holding on. But it is not fair to equate “feature” reviews with what I do in these cases. I am not putting pictures on a cover of a national magazine. I am not mixing my reviews with feature stories. And unlike both national newsweeklies, I have never put my name as a critic on a movie I haven’t seen or split a review with a feature writer. These are the things I object to. David Ansen running a week early is not keeping me up nights.
Childress goes on to write about possible solutions to the question of embargoes, but I think he misses the mark by quite a distance. The answer is individual attention, so studios can act and not just react. But that is quite a commitment once they get past the, say, 50 outlets to which they are paying regular attention. And my concern with journalists/critics taking this decision making into their own hands is that the studio response will be less access, not more.
They do not just want positive reviews out there. They are playing defense against the whole field. And it is the rarity that a film has unanimous reviews on either side.
In the meantime, the top 20 critical outlets all have turf that they don’t want to give up to anyone else, much less a bunch of internet people. It is not just pride. They are afraid, appropriately, of losing their jobs.
And so it goes.
What do you think?
Posted by poland at 02:51 PM | Comments (17)
DOAP
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRESIDENT BUSH ASSASSINATION FILM MAKES ITS WORLD PREMIERE AT THE 2006 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
New York, NY (August 31, 2006) - The Toronto International Film Festival released new details today regarding a film in their line-up. Previously referred to as D.O.A.P., the film's actual title is DEATH OF A PRESIDENT. This fictional drama, which mixes archival footage with narrative elements, focuses on the assassination of President George W. Bush in the style of a retrospective documentary. DEATH OF A PRESIDENT makes its world premiere in the festival's Visions section on September 10th at 8:30 p.m. at the Paramount 3 Theatre in Toronto.
"We’re thrilled to be screening the film at Toronto," said writer/director Gabriel Range. “It’s a striking premise which may be seen as highly controversial. But it’s a serious film which I hope will open up the debate on where current US foreign and domestic policies are taking us.”
DEATH OF A PRESIDENT is a thought-provoking critique of the contemporary American political landscape. In the film, President Bush is confronted by a massive anti-war demonstration as he arrives in Chicago to make a speech for business leaders. Unperturbed, Bush goes ahead with the visit but as he leaves the venue, he is gunned down by a sniper. While the nation mourns, the hunt for his killer swings into action and the state apparatus tries to make sense of this horrific attack on the administration. The investigation soon focuses on a Syrian-born suspect.
DEATH OF A PRESIDENT is co-written and directed by Gabriel Range ("The Day Britain Stopped"), and is produced by Borough Films' Range, Simon Finch and Ed Guiney. The executive producer is Robin Gutch. U.S. rights are represented by William Morris Independent, with distribution already secured in the UK by Film Four/Channel 4.
Posted by poland at 08:25 AM | Comments (80)
August 30, 2006
Filler? I Hardly Know Her!
I'm sure there is something worth discussing here on the blog today.... but damned if I know what it is!
Posted by poland at 02:25 AM | Comments (62)
August 29, 2006
Tomald McCruiseald
Worth 1000 seeks new employment for Mr. Cruise
Posted by poland at 11:36 AM | Comments (25)
August 28, 2006
Monday Monday...
I don't know when I will be back at at he computer today... so here is a free-for-all page... have at it...
Here's Monday's Hot Button to chew on...
Posted by poland at 10:18 AM | Comments (59)
August 27, 2006
Another Case Of Idiotic Non-News Hype
The opening of the Emmy Awards on Sunday night was a 5-minute sketch that ran across six different Emmy winning shows at a cost of no less than half a million dollars.
And there was a tragic plane accident in Kentucky that killed 49 people after the plane failed to take off at 6am this morning.
The first show that was part of the Emmy package was Lost, which started its run with a mid-air plane crash.
And now, a Kentucky TV station general manager, Matt Drudge and others seem to think that the sketch, which involves the air mishap joke for all of 22 seconds, is a national embarrassment. (You can see the 22 seconds and not the whole 5 minute segment, which also makes light of Tom Cruise's sexuality and the child molester-catching episodes of Dateline here.) Ultimately, the joke of the Lost bit was that it was invited to the Emmys last year and not this year.
Are we really that sensitive that a joke about a TV show gets couched into some sort of condemnable insensitivity to a real life tragedy? And will we in the media ever see anything with clear eyes instead of as a self-promotional opportunity again?
Posted by poland at 09:56 PM | Comments (66)
More Toronto Trailers
The Wind That Shakes The Barley
One To Another (via Twitch)
And last week's list, with links that do work if you click through.
PLUS - A non-fest trailer for a sexy Spanish female hitwoman flick owned by Sony International
Posted by poland at 05:04 PM | Comments (9)
Weekend Estimates by Klady - 8/27/06
Another weekend without much worth discussing.
The Devil Wears Prada finally cracked $120 million.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest passed Spider-Man to become the sixth highest domestic grosser of all time. #5 domestic is looking unlikely, with $23 million to go.
And DMC passed Star Wars: Episode One – The Phantom Menace and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers to become the fourth highest grossing film of all-time worldwide. The next record is $47.5 million away… #3’s Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone. #2 is $90 million away. And of course, Titanic’s top slot is not in play.
In a show of pop vs critics muscle in the limited runs, The Illusionist ($1.8m) beat out Half Nelson ($200k) both in gross and per-screen ($12,687 vs $10,000).
New Line suffered yet again, with Hoot and How to Eat Fred Worms as bookend family film car wreck releases. Worms did slightly better than Underground Owl (est $3.9m vs $3.4m), but both suggest this is a category that NL might want to stay away from in theatrical from now on.
Snakes on a Plane was no relief, with a 56% drop. But when all the media writes about why your film didn’t do better, that creates acidic word of mouth, regardless of the film, which no studio has ever overcome in my memory. Everyone talks about the curiosity factor, but it’s not real. Someone has to spend their $10 and when push comes to shove, people make other choices. Oddly, silly as it is, this film deserved better.
World Trade Center will end up doing a little over $70 million domestic, which is good, but not sensational. If Paramount is smart, they will pull back on the hype for now and relaunch the picture as an awards film in November along with the DVD release. Let Maggie have her baby. Get screenwriter Andrea Berloff out there. Get another round of Oliver Stone stories out there in late October. See what the territory looks like after the Toronto bloodbath (and I do expect that a lot of titles are going to burn at TO this year). And go to war with a fresh face. Definitely develop new materials for the next push. And celebrate $70 million for this film… moping around is the surest way to signal to voters that the film is a loser (see: Cinderella Man).
Okay… done stretching for now…
This weekend looks a lot like the same weekend last year. Invincible at an estimated $17m… Brothers Grimm at $15 million (both from Disney, oddly). The top ten number is a couple of million behind last year’s. Yadda, yadda, yadda…
================================================
3-Day Estimates | Weekend | % Change | Cume
Invincible | 16.9 | - | 16.9
Talladega Nights | 8.1 | -41% | 127.8
Little Miss Sunshine | 7.3 | 31% | 22.9
Beerfest | 6.6 | - | 6.6
Accepted | 6.5 | -36% | 21.1
World Trade Center | 6.3 | -42% | 55.5
Snakes on a Plane | 6.2 | -56% | 26.5
Step Up | 6.0 | -41% | 50.2
Idlewild | 5.9 | - | 5.9
Barnyard | 5.4 | -28% | 54.7
Posted by poland at 10:55 AM | Comments (24)
August 26, 2006
Friday Estimates by Klady - 8/26/06
A fairly ugly weekend heating up…
The reasonably leggy holdovers – Talladega Nights, Little Miss Sunshine, World Trade Center – should all do more than triple the Friday number. Same with the two children’s films, Barnyard and How To Eat Fried Worms. If it weren’t opening weekend, you could be pretty sure about the same for Invincible, which seems to be a quality experience… but will girls go with their boyfriends/husbands on Date Night?
Boy this is boring.
Late August blue.
==========================
Invincible | 5.4 | 2917 | - | 5.4
Beerfest | 2.7 | 2964 | - | 2.7
Talladega Nights | 2.5 | 3370 | -40% | 122.2
Accepted | 2.1 | 2917 | -44% | 16.7
Idlewild | 2.1 | 973 | - | 2.1
Little Miss Sunshine | 2.0 | 1430 | 28% | 46.1
Step Up | 1.9 | 2647 | -44% | 46.1
Snakes on a Plane | 1.8 | 3555 | -66% | 22.1
World Trade Center | 1.8 | 3021 | -44% | 51
Barnyard | 1.5 | 3003 | -28% | 50.7
How to Eat Worms | 1.2 | 1870 | - | 1.2
Posted by poland at 10:27 AM | Comments (15)
August 25, 2006
Box Office Hell - 8/25/06
Posted by poland at 12:21 PM | Comments (21)
August 24, 2006
And What Did You Think?
And so, with the summer at an end, what were your favorite moments, worst moments, and most memorable moments... on or off screen...
Posted by poland at 11:33 PM | Comments (56)
Would This Commerical Have Helped 2 Weeks Ago?
Snakes On A Plane... for girls.
Posted by poland at 08:11 PM | Comments (10)
Lunch With David VII - Cruise Control
"Have you picked a side yet?"
Posted by poland at 08:03 PM | Comments (23)
20 Weeks Of Summer Are Over
We started with Tom Cruise and we end with Tom Cruise… ah, the horror of symmetry. It's hard to say which evocation I more dislike. (Actually, I'll stop hedging… I prefer the bad movie to the bad soap opera.)
43 films opened wide this summer (2 more this weekend).
Theatrical box office, as people really paying attention last summer knew, is up, but basically stable.
In the most expensive summer season ever, studios were hit by the harsh realization - which started becoming clear 18 months ago, when Christmas DVD movie sales disappointed - that they could lose a shitload of money. Warner Bros has copped to losing money on four movies and will lose money on five. Paramount had some winners, but the red ink is still red on Mission: Impossible III. Fox had big hits with X3 and The Devil Wears Prada and major losers with Garfield 2, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, and Just My Luck. Universal will make money on two crap comedies, but lose money on its one great summer film, Miami Vice.
Posted by poland at 05:37 PM | Comments (17)
Flies On Shit
Been out all day... just back in time to be disgusted by the ongoing pile-on of Traditional and Online Media over the decidedly minor Tom Cruise story.
We have crossed over into tabloid hell.
At least Mel Gibson actually drove drunk, he was actually arrested, and he actually said anti-semetic things.
Yes, I was a monkey in the monkey tree yesterday. But this story has overstayed its welcome. And like Gibson, will be a non-story in all of two weeks.
And really, shouldn't we all be embarrassed to be trying to capture attention by leveraging Tom Cruise's business relationship?
Posted by poland at 04:36 PM | Comments (28)
August 23, 2006
Now All They Need...
... is Lindsay Lohan getting loaded at The Ivy and going down on some guy in the back of the van while the paparazzi snap away.*
(*Notes for Not-LAers - The Ivy is where Lohan is often shot leaving and is a block away from Kitson, which is a phenomenon that has a lot to do with her and other celebrities shoppping there. "Going down" is... well... you can figure that out...)
Posted by poland at 10:37 PM | Comments (6)
Cruise-ifixion Clarification
Since Mr. Redstone has the world chasing its own tail and taking this all very personally, I thought I would add this bit of clarity...
Though some would like to throw Steven Spielberg & DreamWorks into this fracas, word has it that not only wasn't Mr. S. part of this decision making process, he was traveling when it all went down and found out about it when most people did... from TV coverage of Sumner's quote in the Wall Street Journal.
I don't foresee Cruise’s distribution deal landing inside the DreamWorks pipeline or Universal, where I expect to see Mr. Spielberg returning in 30 months or so, but I am comfortable, knowing the landscape at Paramount these days, that there are no DW fingerprints of S, K, or G on this.
The real question is whether Freston or Grey knew that Sumner was going to shoot off his mouth. I look forward to running into this week’s newschannel superstarlet – watch as she learns how to bring her English Rose complexion to lovely life on camera with the right make-up – Merissa Marr one of these days to ask her just how this all happened.
"I'm from The Wall Street Journal."
"You're from Wall Street? Which fund?"
"No, The Wall Street Journal!"
"Yes."
"The news organization, sir."
"Cruise in our organization? No, he won't be bringing us down anymore."
"Sir... I am a reporter from the Wall Street Journal!!!"
"No, we will not be reporting a loss this quarter. And we're getting rid of that Cruise kid..."
"Okay... let me get my pen."
"Yes, his contract is at its end."
Or something like that...
Posted by poland at 12:34 PM | Comments (18)
Happy Anniversary To Me...
I've written just under 3000 columns, representing about 3.5 million words. Those columns have been read no fewer than 50 million times. (And if I had a dollar for every…)
In addition, today will mark the 1000th entry in The Hot Blog since it moved to the MCN server 17 months ago. In that time, the blog has gotten over 38,500 comments. Before that, housed on TypePad, there were 294 entries and over 5000 comments in its 6 months and 17 days. Really, it's shocking to me that in a couple of weeks, I will have been blogging for two full years.
The first entry was "Do I Need A Blog?" I'm still wondering.
Posted by poland at 08:58 AM | Comments (30)
P.S.
One more thought on Cruise/Wagner...
Mission:Impossible 3 cost a lot (at least $50 million) less than Superman Returns and made more at the box office and should do similar numbers in Home Entertainment.
Paramount won't re-up thier deal with Cruise/Wagner.
Warner Bros. is claiming that they will make $50 million in Superman Returns
The difference in gross point dollars being paid out is about $40 million.
Who do YOU thnk is lying?
Oh, but wait... it's about jumping on couches and arguing with Matt Lauer. My bad.
Or to put it in Anne Thompson terms... who would you rather have fronting your next $250 million (including P&A) investment, Tom Cruise or Bryan Singer?
Posted by poland at 08:45 AM | Comments (32)
The Biggest Loser In Paramount/Cruise? Journalists
As the continuing spewing on Tom Cruise & Paramount continues, I have mostly been amazed by how the central issue has been endlessly misreported.
Cruise/Wagner was not fired. Their relationship with Paramount was not terminated. There was a negotiation for a new deal and the deal didn’t happen.
Sumner Redstone made it a much bigger story with his shocking statement… which was shocking because it was so ineptly handled. A.F.S.P. Anything for Stock Price.
Merissa Marr deserves all the credit for getting this comment from Redstone, however, there is zero question about the lack of honesty in Redstone’s comment. Even if Cruise had cost the studio $150 million in grosses ($75 million in net rentals… $7.5 million lot by Cruise himself) on M:I3, this unquantifiable figure is only relevant because of the overall gross on the film. Had the movie made $600 million worldwide and the studio expected $750 million, Cruise/Wagner would have been re-upped in June.
Furthermore, the lack of any reporting effort at all out there is a shocker. The simple math is: Redstone has had to cut a check to Tom Cruise of approximately $60 million dollars on a movie that cost at least $180 million (including the money written off for the three false starts) plus another $100 million in marketing and netted the company about $135 million in theatrical release (after Cruise’s cut was taken into account).
How much more will Cruise get paid as the movie goes into the Home Entertainment market?
How much will Paramount lose on the movie while Cruise gets another massive payday?
The idea of gross point deals was, from the studio perspective, always to be partners of a kind. If the movie does well, everyone does well. What has forced the studios to “pull back” – this year’s most overreported story, driven by agents who won’t shut up and who journalists forget… are AGENTS – is that the cost of production and distribution on these films has gotten so enormous that there is not enough money to share from dollar one. When studio breakeven is $500 million worldwide and only 44 films have ever made that much (about 4 a year lately), there is a serious problem.
Pixar’s deal with Disney was so much in Disney’s favor that there was no way for Michael Eisner to be responsible to his stockholders and to make the deal for Pixar to stay. And faced with losing Pixar, Bob Iger’s response was to buy the company. That was his only option. For $6 billion. Way overpriced. But the alternate was unpleasant, public, and the only amount anyone would have ever made on a Pixar movie again would be a $100 million distribution fee, as the company started self-financing.
Revolution Studios’ deal at Sony was so much in Revolution’s favor that re-upping was never an option for Sony. The quality or lack of quality or the politics between the companies was and is a secondary consideration. Revolution made a ton on that relationship and they weren’t dismissed… they just couldn’t suck the cream from big momma anymore.
Cruise/Wagner is no different. Expensive. High profile. Big money maker. But as soon as they crossed the line into being a risk, it was over with Paramount… unless they made concessions. It’s not f-ing complicated. The idea – hardy har – that this was an overhead issue is nutty on its face. C/W is getting going to make more than half a decade of that high overhead figure on M:I3 alone… make it for themselves. Paramount threw away – with due respect to the films – much more money on C/W/ produced films that never had a commercial chance than they ever did on overhead.
Think about it this way. If your cell phone carrier was still charging you $1 a minute and your contract came up and you noticed that there were other options that cost less than 5 cents a minute, would you change carriers? In that case, you might pay the $150 penalty for dropping service because you would save so much every month. But in this case, the contract was up. There are no penalties. All Paramount did was to switch companies.
And all Cruise/Wagner will do is switch how they package their product. No, they will never find a deal as rich as the one at Paramount. That was a sucker’s deal in the first place. But they could make a lot more money this way, self-financing. They will be far more compelled to keep their budgets down. And as a funder and a gross player, Cruise stands to make money on both sides if he can produce hits at a price. It doesn’t even need to be The Passion of The Christ. One $400 million worldwide hit that costs $100 million instead of $180 million and all of a sudden, Cruise taking 12% of the gross and half the profits is a $100 million-plus payday and not a $75 million one.
It is possible, however, that Paramount is getting out of the Tom Cruise business at just the right moment. Perhaps he has jumped the shark. But that is a completely different conversation.
And hey, the story “Tom Cruise fired for being a whacko” is so much more interesting than reality. Dredging up Oprah’s couch is more interesting than the facts that sit under our noses.
And Sumner Redstone knows this. And he played the fourth estate like a fiddle. Instead of being Eisner, falsely accused of making a terrible business call on Pixar, he is some sort of hero, standing up to Crazy Tom Cruise. More importantly, he is covering his ass for when Cruise starts making a ton of money elsewhere. “Well, it wasn’t really about money was it?”
It was.
And thus, it is a dark week for journalism.
Posted by poland at 08:39 AM | Comments (6)
August 22, 2006
Not Terribly Interesting To Me, But From The Glass House On Melrose...
Merissa Marr scooped the final decision not to renew the Cruise/Wagner deal at Paramount. The only interesting part of it - for a company that just overspent on DreamWorks and doesn't need any more rich foods in their diet - is that Sumner Redstone talked to the press directly....
Paramount Ends Relationship With Tom Cruise's Company
By MERISSA MARR
August 22, 2006 7:48 p.m.
Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone said his company's Paramount Pictures is terminating its 14-year relationship with actor Tom Cruise's production company, citing the actor's controversial and sometimes erratic behavior of the past year.
Mr. Cruise, the star of Paramount hits like "Mission: Impossible," "Top Gun" and "Days of Thunder," has based his moviemaking company, Cruise/Wagner Productions, on the Paramount lot since 1992. But in the past year, Mr. Cruise's star has fallen in the wake of a series of public incidents in which he stumped for his faith in the Church of Scientology; severely criticized the use of antidepressant drugs; and engaged in sometimes offbeat behavior, such as jumping up and down on Oprah Winfrey's couch to proclaim his love for actress Katie Holmes.
Paramount now believes that Mr. Cruise's behavior hurt the box office of his most recent film, "Mission: Impossible III." Now, Mr. Redstone said he wants to sever the studio's connection to its biggest star.
"As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal," Mr. Redstone said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount."
A spokeswoman for Cruise/Wagner Productions declined to comment.
After being contacted by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Cruise's representatives presented a different version of events. They said that Mr. Cruise's production company had decided to set up an independent operation financed by two top hedge funds, which they declined to name. Paula Wagner, Mr. Cruise's partner in the company, said such an arrangement represented a new business model for top actors prominent enough to take advantage of the flood of money coming into Hollywood from Wall Street.
"This is a dream of Tom and mine," Ms. Wagner said. She challenged Mr. Redstone's assertion that Mr. Cruise's behavior had cost the studio ticket sales, pointing out that the star's movies have made the studio a huge amount of money.
Posted by poland at 04:56 PM | Comments (57)
The Toronto List...
Opening night will rock... but not at the Opening NIght Film. On the serious side, the first screening of Deliver Us from Evil should rock the town. And then, at Midnight, true madness... the Toronto premiere of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhs at Midnight... which I intend to be at, ready for anything.
The Working List... still evolving...
The Masterpieces Going In
Borat - Larry Charles
Day Night Day Night - Julia Loktev
Little Children - Todd Field
Great Expectations or Seen & Solid
The Fall Tarsem Singh
We've been waiting for what's next from this director for a while... fingers crossed
Fay Grim Hal Hartley
A return to form?
The Fountain Darren Aronofsky
Aronofsky's first epic, with the first Hugh Jackman lead and the magnificent Weisz
Jindabyne Ray Lawrence
The director of the much underappreciated Lantana, just picked up by Sony Classics
Pan's Labyrinth Guillermo del Toro
GdT is GoD. (Well, he's cool and fun and smart... but that's nto as quotable)
Paris, Je T'aime Bruno Podalydès, Gurinder Chadha, Gus Van Sant, Joel and Ethan Coen, Walter Salles, Daniela Thomas, Christopher Doyle, Isabel Coixet, Nobuhiro Suwa, Sylvain Chomet, Alfonso Cuarón, Olivier Assayas, Oliver Schmitz, Richard LaGravenese, Vincenzo Natali, Wes Craven, Tom Tykwer, Frédéric Auburtin, Gérard Depardieu, Alexander Payne
It's got to be interesting, right?
Stranger than Fiction Marc Forster
A commerial movie that is aiming higher
Venus Roger Michell
Do we have a better, more daring commerical/art filmmaker working right now than Michell?
2:37 Murali K. Thalluri
Lots of controversy around this 22 year old's work, which already landed him in Cannes and now, The TO.
Macbeth Geoffrey Wright
A hot Shakespeare title again, with another remake on BBC's Shakespeare Re-Told series. This one from the promising Romper Stomper director.
Shortbus John Cameron Mitchell
Really interesting piece... everyone talks about the graphic sex (onanism leading to a self-swallow opens the film), but it blossoms into a whole lot more.
Invisible Waves - Pen-ek Ratanaruang
Interetsing director... Chris Doyle behind the camera...
EMPz 4 Life - Allan King
One of the greatest documentarians alive aims his long, verite' lens at four troubled teens in suburban Toronto.
Rescue Dawn Werner Herzog
The feature version of Little Dieter Needs To Fly, starring Chrisitan Bale... it's gotta be something... it could be truly great
Strike Volker Schlöndorff
The birth of the Solidarity movement from an always interesting Eastern European director
For Your Consideration Christopher Guest
Ckris Guest mocks the awards business... and i didn't even get a cameo...
Nouvelle Chance Anne Fontaine
I adore Ms. Fontaine's work and always look forward to what she has come up with
Black Book Paul Verhoeven
A very interesting director when he's on edge... and this return home seems pretty edgy
The Prisoner or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair Michael Tucker, Petra Epperlein
The directors of Gunner Palace return with a 1 hour doc on a character we barely noticed in GP... and once again offer the balanced, straight take on some bad acts in Iraq
Deliver Us From Evil Amy Berg
I have written on this remarkable film before. Amy is a friend, so I won't be calling it a masterpiece this week. But the central figure, a pedophile priest who confesses on camera and tries to apologize in his own crazy way, is unlike any movie character you've seen since Hannibal Lechter. (coming from Lionsgate in October)
Ghosts of Cité Soleil Asger Leth
This doc about current Haiti, which the filmmakers now call The Most Dangerous Place on Earth, looks overwhelming
10 Items or Less Brad Silberling
Silberling's first out and out comedy is a movie lover's movie, telling the story of a movie star who looks, talks, and acts a lot like Morgan Freeman, who gots to a bodega in the L.A. suburbs to research a part, meets the world's hottest check out girl, Paz Vega, (she competes with P-Cruz in Volver, actually) and ends up researching a lot more than he expected to that day. Shot on the run with great, charming turns by Freeman, Vega, and a parade of perfect cameoers, 10 Items is going to be one of the unexpected treats for a lot of folks weary from passionate exploration of the soul after passionate exploration of the soul at the fest... though it really does explore deeper feelings as well.
Catch a Fire Phillip Noyce
A drama about Apartheid from a smart, skilled, often political director of slick films. Should be very worth the time.
The Dog Problem Scott Caan
Caan's Dallas 362 was a fest favorite, though it never really found a home. But he is a young director worth watching. And so we shall...
Exiled Johnnie To
One of the kick-ass Asian beloveds, To will also have Election and Election 2 at TIFF.
Posted by poland at 01:42 PM | Comments (43)
August 21, 2006
When One-Sheets Mate
Posted by poland at 10:35 PM | Comments (5)
The Snakes Rating
The one element I didn’t really highlight in the Snakes on a Plane piece this morning was the issue of PG-13 vs R. And besides some very nice e-mails with some very smart arguments, this issue was what drew the most e-mail.
To wit: “Oh ca'mon ...this is easy..... SoaP needed to be PG-13...plain and simple....It's a horror movie....opening during the summer.....The $$$ New Line could've seen if it had been given the correct rating....The teenage contingent would've had a strong repeat in showings....My husband and I went to see it over the weekend....We have a 15 yr old son who would probably seen it at least twice with his friends if it weren't for the foolish 'R' rating (which this version deserved). A few wise editing choices and SoaP would've had HUGE numbers....Do any of the filmmakers or anyone at New Line have any teenagers? They blew it. Seems like an easy, common sense call. Too bad they didn't release two versions...along the same vein of what Fox did with "28 Days Later." Don’t get me wrong...I loved it and followed it all year long over the internet...it was great fun...no doubt. However...with the low weekend numbers...no one should be surprised.”
Or
“My kids were so crazy to see this movie, but didn’t want Mom to take them. The rating was the #1 problem, if you ask me (a movie marketer, admittedly.)”
Of course, New Line famously re-shot some of the film to turn it from a PG-13 into an R. And Saw did an $18m opening and $55m total domestic and it was hailed by the media as a phenomenon. Snakes is being mocked as a flop by some.
What do you think?
Posted by poland at 04:47 PM | Comments (43)
The Darjeeling Regression
I almost never do this, but I danced through the screenplay for The Darjeeling Limited this weekend, comfortable that whatever is on the page of a Wes Anderson movie will be something altogether when I see it on a screen. Story movies, he does not make.
What first caught my eye were his co-writers - Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman – and the retro tone of the whole enterprise. Then, it smacked me in the face was that this trio of characters was oddly familiar. The three brothers…
Francis… Ford Coppola
Peter... Bogdanovich
Jack… Nicholson
The trio all worked for Roger Corman in the early 60s.
Francis Coppola is, obviously, a relative to two of the screenwriters and his distinctly verbose and controlling lead role in the movie makes sense. The character is loaded with quirky, detail oriented quirks. One wonders whether anyone in the family actually ever called him “Frannie.”
Peter Bogdanovich is the fussy one, as he is in the script. And as in the script, got pregnant with his girl, then Polly Platt, early on… and went on to divorce her before their firstborn daughter was 3. (The relationship is not part of the movie, thus, not a spoiler. But the discussion is in there.)
I considered whether Jack was Jack Hill, but he isn’t the legendary character and girl chaser that Nicholson is. In the script, the character is always on the make and somehow, still, a good guy, and pretty much willing to indulge his “brothers,” so long as he can keep his game going.
The script reads like either a story about a trip the Coppola boys heard as kids and are fictionalizing in their heads or just a pure fiction developed after a late night of binging on whatever, when someone said, “You know what would be really cool? Can you imagine is Francis and his appetites and Bogdanovich, before the cravats, and Nicholson were actually brothers? They’d be cooler than the Marxes, the Howards, and the Ritzes combined. So we put them on a train all together, forced to be together.” “Cool.” “Cool.”
Of course, we know from Roman’s first film that he is interested in that 60s period. Anderson too. And they grew up around these men, all of whom went on to legendary status in the industry.
Interesting, huh?
Well… maybe… to some of you…
(EDIT: It's Darjeeling Limited, not Express... my bad...)
Posted by poland at 11:10 AM | Comments (44)
Snake Bit?
ISSUE: The Title
CHOICE: Do you stick with "Snakes on a Plane," as Samuel L. Jackson and the internet band felt was a "must do" or do you find a title that will piss off the heeks, but might be more marketable?
TRUTH: Snakes on a Plane is an attention grabber, every bit as much as Air Pacific 242 (or whatever it was) is not. But Snakes on a Plane also separates your interested from your uninterested like a knife through butter.
CONSEQUENCE: According to tracking, about one quarter of the potential audience this weekend had no interest in seeing this movie. Figure another 50 percent really needed their brains twisted in order to get them serious about buying a ticket. So you're down to 25 percent of the audience that you are selling the movie to comfortably, based on the name alone. SoaP got about 15% of the weekend audience. Not bad, considering.
Posted by poland at 10:56 AM | Comments (29)
August 20, 2006
Jeffrey Wells Update
As most of you know, Jeffrey Wells is not my favorite journalist and is often not my favorite person... but he is a human being. And I know some of you read him.
I'm sure he will explain the whole story tomorrow on his blog, but he is ok. The hospital he is at has no internet access, which is why he hasn’t updated since yesterday. He was in some danger of an escalated problem from his blood poisoning, but they have it under control and he expects to be released (and back to work) on Monday morning.
I wish him the best of health and a quick exit from the ranks of entertainment journalists to become a crusader for better health care.
Posted by poland at 08:24 PM | Comments (22)
Video Of The Day - 8/20 - Next Door
Here is the film's official home
Posted by poland at 04:10 PM | Comments (9)
Sunday Estimates by Klady - August 20
The battle over the weekend – to be forgotten by this time next week – is on.
Klady is including the late Thursday showings in his 3-day… Box Office Mojo and Sony are not.
But on top of that, Klady has Talladega Nights $600,000 lower than Sony and Mojo. (Ms. Finke’s box office analysis comes from Sony, so it doesn’t get to be a separate part of the discussion.) So even if he didn’t include Thursday night in the weekend estimate, he would probably still have Snakes in the #1 slot.
What I find remarkable is that Mojo, which is now being held up as a standard, had Talladega at $4.2m on Friday (Klady had it at $3.2m) and the estimates a 38% leap from Friday to Saturday – 38%! – and then a Sunday that matches the Friday, dollar for dollar. Last weekend on Talladega, Saturday went up 21% and Sunday was down 14% from Friday. So who’s zoomin’ who?
Of course, this all speaks to only one thing… Snakes backlash, as discussed yesterday. Sony clearly wants the third weekend at #1 story, but tonight, all the stories will be "what went wrong with the internet" in Traditional Media.
If I had to call it right now, I’d say that Sony saw a chance to take #1 from Snakes and pumped up their numbers by somewhere near a million bucks to make their case. It’s possible that thier numbers are true. But I wouldn’t be betting on it this afternoon.
Either way, this is a disappointing number for SoaP. But at some point, it has to feel a little like Sony snatching the tiny piece of candy left for New Line out of NL’s hand and not even eating it… just throwing it in the dirt and smashing it with their boot.
In other movie news…
World Trade Center isn’t a tank by any means, but $65 million - $70 million for the film will still be a bit of a disappointment for Paramount and suggests that the film failed to become the phenomenon that could have propelled this film into being a major player in the Oscar race, which fir a film like this, could have been good for another $30 million - $50 million at the box office.
I would argue three things got in the way of a bigger success for WTC. 1. A true phenomenon in the form of Talladega Nights. 2. Domination of Traditional Media with discussions of Snakes on a Plane. 3. The release date, which was betwixt & between.
Movies for adults in the summer have traditionally had much earlier dates and hung around for a while. August 11 is the end of the summer. Collateral did $101 million opening a week earlier, but that had Tom Cruise and only did $101 million. Cinderella Man, June… Fahrenheit 9/11, June… Seabiscuit, July… Road to Perdition, July… etc. You have to go back 24 years to An Officer & A Gentleman to find a movie targeting adults that opened after the first week of August that did $100 million. And that film opened to $5 million on 719 screens.
Step Up’s 52% drop is actually a great win for Disney. Teen movie, great surprise, facing 3 new teen titles and the expansion of Little Miss Sunshine… Disney should be thrilled.
Accepted was looking stronger on tracking… but wasn’t. I have a feeling that Universal’s ad spend was commensurate with this opening. This film was lucky not to be direct-to-DVD.
Material Girls and Pulse were a double did of bad movies combined with marketing and distribution that are not at studio level right now. Just aren’t. Not quality, not financially, not in any way. The Weinsteins are still brilliant. MGM’s aspirations might come true some day. But right now, they aren’t even quite Lionsgate… not that there’s anything wrong with that.
==================================
3-Day Estimates | Weekend | % Change | Cume
Snakes on a Plane | 15.3 | - | 15.3
Talladega Nights | 13.5 | -39% | 114.1
World Trade Center | 10.8 | -43% | 45
Step Up | 9.8 | -52% | 39.4
Accepted | 9.7 | - | 9.7
Barnyad | 7.7 | -23% | 46
Little Miss Sunshine | 5.4 | 107% | 12.5
Pirates 2 | 5.0 | -31% | 401
Material Girls | 4.4 | - | 4.4
Pulse | 3.5 | -57% | 14.7
Posted by poland at 11:38 AM | Comments (26)
Apocalypse Pooh
No... not included in the new DVD package...
Posted by poland at 12:58 AM | Comments (3)
August 19, 2006
Friday Estimates by Klady - Aug 18
Not a huge surprise, really. Even my $22 million BO Hell Snakes on a Plane estimate – which unlike charter members of The Axis of Idiots, I (and most of the other Hellers) actually use my own brain and a variety of sources to do - was a bit of a hedge. For the first time in weeks, tracking turned out to be pretty much on target.
(Of course, the A.I.I. is now getting into predicting the 3-day by offering us what one studio thinks, - wouldn’t it be easier if they just admitted what studio was feeding them- another fool’s errand, to try to get the edge. And yes, sometimes that will be right also. MCN actually did predict 3-days based on Friday estimates years ago... and stopped, realizing that it was a dumb game witha 24 hour shelflife and wrong far too ofter to be anything resembling news.)
The discussion of “what happened” will, of course, be misdirected at The Internet by Old Media. It will – unless I am pleasantly surprised - become about fault and not about seeking truth. What I wrote on April 13
Snakes On A Plane - August 18 - New Line's working title of the decade finally arrives as an actual movie. The studio seems pretty happy with how the movie is coming, but if it's not the most fun you ever had while not thinking, the backlash could be tough. Fortunately, it will mean as little as the recent hype has. Watch for a trailer and ads to tell the story.
SNAKES ON A PLANE
What Opening Will Be Called A Flop?: $20 million
The Headline: New Line Fails To Capitalize On Internet Buzz
The Story: "The teen boys who spent months talking about Snakes On A Plane online apparently decided to stay home and download the movie off the internet while text messaging one another and watching episodes of Desperate Housewives on their iPods."
What They'll Leave Out: Only two films in movie history have opened to more than $18.1 million after August 15.
What Opening Will Be Called A Surprise Success? $20 million
The Headline: Snakes Gross Anything But Plain
The Story: "The teen boys who spent months talking about Snakes On A Plane online apparently decided to go to the theater before downloading the movie off the internet while text messaging one another and watching episodes of Desperate Housewives on their iPods."
What They'll Leave Out: This will be one of the cheapest studio releases of the summer.
… remain what I believe. My chart estimates, which started at $42 million and jumped to $68 million, remain about what I think is possible… that range.
The story, at the end of the day, will be that New Line got every dime out of Geek Nation that they could. And didn’t do a great job of expanding the base. For all the yadda, yadda, yadda of the EW cover and all the Traditional Media hype – which they all blamed on the web, as though they weren’t running the stories for a vastly expanded audience – the bottom line in the movies is still ad/trailers that make audiences want to buy tickets. Period. Welcome to the new millennium.
Accepted did well… for the SHIT it is. (The big joke in the PG-13 film is that the school is South Hammond Institute of Technology… or whatever the “H” town is… I can’t be bothered to check it right now… don’t want to spit up my morning coffee…) But the tracking on that film had many looking higher (including me, duh!) than a $9 million weekend. Still… not good for Snakes either. Perception of a $25 million 4-day for SoaP (which would have been more likely without Accepted drawing teens) vs a $20 million 4-day would change the Sunday night reportage significantly.
Step Up sat down. But not before raping a lot of virgins’ piggy banks.
Materials Girls… was that an ad for gum or something? Didn’t this movie already fail once when it was called Uptown Girls? The Duffs can’t be happy that they drew almost a third of what Marisa Tomei and Patty Duke…. uh… I mean, Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning did.
Snakes, depending on your point of view, damaged/covered World Trade Center's second weekend. Instead of any public conversation about WTC continuing once people saw the movie, the media went snake-y and WTC became a quick non-issue, in spite of its significant success in comparison to United 93. Part of this is because Paramount probably shot its real-family load too early, on top of its expensive ad buys. WTC is a word-of-mouth movie and some serious publicity support after the opening weekend would have been a good idea. Regardless, the 42% drop isn’t shocking… but not encouraging. It’s a similar drop to that of Nacho Libre, though Nacho was about $8 million ahead of WTC at this stage of the game. A total in the mid-50s is looking likely about now.
=========================================
Friday | Screens | % Chg | Cume
Snakes on a Plane | 6.2 | 3555 | - | 6.2
Talladega Nights | 3.2 | 3741 | -42% | 104.8
Accepted | 3.6 | 2914 | - | 3.6
Step Up | 3.4 | 2639 | -60% | 33
World Trade Center | 3.2 | 2998 | -46% | 37.4
Barnyard | 2.0 | 3227 | -32% | 40.5
Material Girls | 1.6 | 1509 | - | 1.6
Little Miss Sunshine | 1.5 | 691 | 102% | 8.6
Pirates 2 | 1.3 | 2277 | -35% | 397.4
Pulse | 1.1 | 2323 | -67% | 12.3
New Line is saying $7.8 million through last night, including Thursday night screeings.
Posted by poland at 10:44 AM | Comments (71)
August 18, 2006
When Snakes Met Soft Porn
Even the pervs are in on this one...
Posted by poland at 11:17 PM | Comments (5)
I'm not ready to get off of this yet...
So WB was the winner in the X3/SR showdown?
And the X-Men franchise is worn out because... uh... it beat Superman Returns domestically, internationally and on opening weekend - against much stiffer competition - by almost double?
And why is anyone doing a Bryan Singer suck up story? Well, I guess they were done sucking up to JJ Abrams for the failure of Mission: Impossible III, whose final numbers will almost exactly match the numbers on Superman Returns... except it cost no less than $50 million less to make and marker.
WORLDWIDE THIS SUMMER
POTC: Dead Man's Chest $860m (and rising)
The Da Vinci Code $750m
X-Men: The Last Stand $441m
Mission: Impossible III $392m
Cars $376m
Superman Returns $348m (with 2 major territories left)
Over the Hedge $300m
And gee... isn't M:I3 the impetus to throw Tom Cruise - who have 5 times as many $200 million-plus worldwide grossers on his resume than Bryan "2 X-Men & A SoaperMan" Singer and 4 $400 million grossers to Singer's 1 - off the Paramount lot?
There is a likelihood that Superman Returns will gross less than Godzilla. God-muthafuckin'-zilla.
Bryan Singer has no history as a tentpole director. He is an arthouse director. And the only reason that there was an X2 was because Bryan was "handcuffed" by Tom Rothman's restrictive budget on X1... or that franchise would have died right there.
And where the HELL did WB dig up Cheo Hodari Coker as The Journalist for Anne Thompson to talk to and to defend Bryan Singer? Is that a joke? Did Anne dial those digits with a straight face?
I love Anne. I think she is pushing a strong, progressive agenda for journalists. But geez, girl…
And shame on WB for throwing three other films and teams of filmmakers under the bus to try to save face on the one film they plan on continuing to try to milk... like milking a rattlesnake.
Posted by poland at 07:08 PM | Comments (94)
Box Office Hell - August 18
Posted by poland at 03:16 PM | Comments (17)
The Real Magic Trick
Yes, The Illusionist is coming out this weekend, but the magic trick I am most impressed with is Warner Bros' magical ability to shove the lie of a profitable Superman Returns down the throats of two very smart, very experienced Hollywood reporters.
Claudia Eller takes the tough road... and is still sucked into the scam.
Superman Returns is, even by the studio spin, $170 million in the hole right now... $230 million if you count the $60 million that was thrown away before cameras rolled. (Add another big chunk for late marketing expenses to which they haven't admitted.)
It is possible that the movie will make another $25 million in rentals in the next month or two. But that is it.
So Alan Horn is saying the movie is going to make $200 million in the after market?
I'll make you a bet now. He'll sell you the futures stock on that $200 million for $100 million cash today.
And this is the same gorup of reporters who keep calling the $750 million grossing The Matrix Reloaded a disaster? I guess WB learned their lesson. Spin early. Spin often. If you go on the record, people will buy this shite.
ADD - I was in a bit of a rush and forgot to include Bryan Singer's 18 million in back end money (gross points) that will also be part of the red ink on SR.
Posted by poland at 12:42 PM | Comments (39)
Snakes On A M-Fing Plane
If you want to understand the complexity of the film, try snakes on pretty much every bodily part you can imagine that doesn't excrete solid waste.
Truth is, the movie does find a clever way to turn the third act into a third act and not just more of the same. It's not so great that I feel compelled to discuss it conceptually, but it is clever enough.
Posted by poland at 07:10 AM | Comments (22)
Lunch With David VI - Taking Responsibility
Posted by poland at 07:09 AM | Comments (7)
August 17, 2006
Avi Lerner = Low Budget John Lennon
You may have seen this ad that ran on a full page in the L.A. Times yesterday. It's been touted as an effort by the celebrities to come out against the horrible conflict on the Israel/Lebanon border... as though any one cared how Hollywood celebrities felt about the issue...
View the whole ad with all the celebrity names
Still, for some reason, the actual creator and financier of the ad seems to have escaped notice...
Nu Image is, of course, the company responsible for Cyborg Cop, Human Timebomb, Diary of a Sex Addict, and of course, the class, S.S. Doomtrooper.
Behind Nu Image and Millennium Films… the lanky Haifa-based-Israeli-turned-Hollywoodian, Avi Lerner (along with Trevor Short and Danny Dimbort).
And to be fair, he is working hard to move up in class, most recently involved wit higher profile titles like 16 Blocks, The Wicker Man, The Black Dahlia, King Of California, Home of the Brave and, the brilliantly titled, Napoleon & Betsy (and yes, it’s that Napoleon, not a charming dog that changes a child’s life).
Anyway... just a factual detail that no one seemed to bother to notice while mocking all the folks who allowed Avi to use their names.
Posted by poland at 04:53 PM | Comments (39)
WeinsteinCo Release Update
THE PROTECTOR September 8
FEAST September 22 & 23 (late night screenings only)
SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS September 29
STORMBREAKER October 6
D.O.A.: DEAD OR ALIVE FALL TBD
BOBBY November 17 (NY & LA), November 23 (nationwide)
BLACK CHRISTMAS December 25
MISS POTTER December 29 (limited)
BREAKING & ENTERING December TBD
Posted by poland at 01:42 PM | Comments (13)
20 Weeks Of Summer 19
Q: How will Gail Berman follow up World Trade Center?
A: Negotiations have already started for the Oliver Stone/Kevin Smith collaboration, Clerks: Iraq, a completely apolitical film set in a fast shawarma restaurant in Baghdad, Iraq circa 2005. Two American soldiers get stuck in the restaurant with two wacky wiseguys and 70 very sexy virgins who the guys try to convince are their prize for participating in a suicide bombing. Hilarity ensues when they find WMDs under the ice cream freezer!
(EDIT - Misspell corrected at 1:25p, 8/17)
Posted by poland at 10:18 AM | Comments (19)
Video of the Day - 8/17 - Burning Safari
Posted by poland at 07:00 AM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2006
2 More Francis Comments
Joseph asked in another entry about Hearts of Darkness. It came up in the audience questions and Mr. Coppola explained that the reason HOD is not in this "complete" Apocalypse set is that it is a separate movie... and he still has some issues with it.
He left it by promising he would work towards a DVD release and thought he would like to do a commentary track for it to set the record straight.
ALSO (and this is kinda burying the lead) - Francis said, "No one will be shooting on celluloid in four years."
He acknowledged that there are a few who are still sticking to cutting on a Moviola. So maybe there will be one or two holdouts. But four years... film is out. So sayeth Francis.
Posted by poland at 10:54 PM | Comments (68)
Whither Old Media?
After Patrick Goldstein and Anne Thompson and Roger Moore yesterday, I got to thinking...
The Los Angeles Times and New York Times see movies early for one reason… so they can get features written, positive features. When is the last time you saw an attack on a movie or a studio in which the studio cooperated and/or screened the movie? I can't think of a single one.
As far as the trades go, their product is now seen in mainstream media via the newswires and the web. So aside from tradition, why do the trades have any right to run reviews earlier than anyone else? They are no longer just an industry thing.
The truth is, we are ALL making deals all the time. Traditional Friday review days are part of a service to the readership on local newspapers… no point in reviewing before the readers can use the info to inform their moviegoing choices. But as time has passed, that tradition has become a standard.
Generally speaking, I don't care if the release day embargo dies in the year to come. But let's not suggest this for all media outlets without considering the consequences. And critics will like them least of all, because the quick reality will be even fewer films being screened for anyone ahead of time without a new, stricter embargo deal in place.
Posted by poland at 10:31 AM | Comments (7)
Jeff Wells Is Down
Spam Dooley is taking credit, but I suspect it is something more traditional on the web... like forgetting to renew a URL or changing server companies and believing it would be seamless.
We at MCN Blogs, of course, will do our best to make life easier for Jeffrey. We even saved his header for future use. (I'm sure he'll be back online before we know it. After all, Bush was reelected in the midst of a hated war.)
And riddle me this... is a 20 minute clip, some free hors deurves, a hand shake and a smile from a singing diva, and a Japanese trailer really enough to lock up the Oscar season for people now?
Looks like I may have ot lower the price for my soul.
Posted by poland at 10:23 AM | Comments (15)
Video Of The Day - 8/16 - Aliens Music Video
Posted by poland at 07:00 AM | Comments (4)
August 15, 2006
Francis In L.A.
Francis Ford Coppola came to L.A. tonight to promote the DVD release of Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier, a 2-disc set of box the original and Redux – in a very cool system that allows you to jump from one to another without stopping the film or changing discs – plus a lot of great extras…
GREAT extras.
The event was at the DGA and they showed about an hour of the five hours of documentary material available here, from the music to the production to the natives in the Philippines to the sound design… fascinating.
Then Coppola and the DVD producer took the stage to answer questions. The highlights:
Coppola’s most recent cut of Youth Without Youth goes 2:46. Walter Murch is working on cutting it down right now. And Coppola was very clear that he has no intention of making the release version of this movie anywhere near that length.
Coppola is also 40 pages into his next screenplay, another personal film that he can self-finance.
Coppola said quite clearly that Megalopolis is over… because, he says, he failed to lick the script, because the budget was too high for art financing and too small a film for franchise funding, and because over the decade he’s been working on it, things have changed so much in the world that the script would need significant reworking.
Coppola thinks that Lucas came up with the idea of claiming Joseph Campbell was the groundwork for Star Wars after the film had become a success, “and was trying to figure out why it was so popular.”
Coppola told the story about how angry he was at being presented the Godfather videogame as a fait accompli and commented, “I haven’t heard any more, so I assume it was a flop… I hope so.”
Posted by poland at 10:59 PM | Comments (40)
Flags Of Our Sisters
One extra image for the extra interested...
From The Upcoming Movie, DOA: Dead Or Alive
Posted by poland at 03:12 PM | Comments (21)
The Japanese Trailer For Eastwood's Japanese View Of Iwo Jima
ADDED BY REQUEST...
Posted by poland at 12:51 PM | Comments (58)
Video Of The Day - 8/15 - We Fuck The World
Posted by poland at 01:00 AM | Comments (1)
Another Slow Week In TinselVille
There's nothing much to write about... could try to sitir up shit for no reason, but I will leave that to others.
There was a lovely little Dreamgirls evening at which they showed the Cannes film package followed by Supporting Actrss nominee Jennifer Hudson singing three songs live, plus tuna tartare from Spago.
The story about Tom Pollock and Ivan Reitman's Montecito getting $200 million was only interesting to me becase the number was so small. I guess it was special because it was Wall Street money backing one producer, but... zzzzzz... glad they have the money... sure they'll get that 11.2% return for The Street...
Positve response to the Children of Men trailer combined with ongoing hopes that Al Cuaron can get a directing nod has led to a Dec 25 date shift for Children of Men... apparently there are some visual pyrotechinics of a Scorsese/Welles nature... we'll see... it will have to be more than that, but Cuaron is capable of delivering a lot more than that. (Love Michael Caine as John Hurt as Dumbledore!)
And, of course, Snakes On A Quiz...
Posted by poland at 12:05 AM | Comments (32)
August 14, 2006
To Sir With Crack
Half Nelson is one of those movies…
Beautifully made… beautifully acted… and in spite of many, many people wanting to see it otherwise, false to its very core.
I wish I could get on board with the Greatest Teacher Ever By Day… Soulful-Eyed Crack Addict By Night thing. But I can’t. It is as false as Superman parenting a child and having that be such a minor part of the Superman Returns soap opera or Tom Cruise needing to use suepr-duper Rube Goldberg devices to get into buildings in M:I3 while his crew all found much easier points of entry to the very same buildings or Miranda Priestly’s “you go girl” smirk at the end of The Devil Wears Prada, signifying that even she knows that The Girl was right and she was wrong.
These things are all critical to the audience accepting and enjoying the film. All of these were elements in essentially well made (or professionally enough made) films. And they are all manipulative crap.
Certainly, I have to acknowledge that late in the third act of Half Nelson, our hero starts to act a bit like a crack addict… a bit. But by that point, it seems like a construct to avoid the obvious accusation of, “what kind of crack addict is that?” Even then, there is a terribly clever device of comparing his family’s alcohol issues with the relatively clean drug selling of the black family he has become involved with – moral equivalency… the death of the Gen X left – that does its best to let our handsome star off the hook for his own behavior.
Truth is, Ryan Gosling does do a magnificent job making a crack addict an appealing, “my hair is a mess and that signifies my horrible disinterest,” sympathetic character. His performance reminds, once again, that if he wanted to be a movie star he could be. (Clearly, he doesn’t want to.) Gosling creates a character who is nuanced, uses his education and intelligence to protect himself, and never gets mean, which lets us know that he is too vulnerable to ever be mean. But how did this guy get into crack and why are we sympathetic to a guy using in the girl’s locker room? (Oh, the irony of the raves for this film in the same month as the Mel Gibson drunk driving debacle…)
The movie is very smartly designed so that Gosling’s character, Dan, can patronize the black community around him while embracing it while fearing it while supporting it. The movie does the same thing. Dan is not alone in having a heart of gold. Everyone in the movie has a heart of gold. And this makes for some wonderful, seductive performances. (I would not object in any way to the young Shareeka Epps getting a Supporting Actress nomination, though I don’t foresee this film making a dent at The Academy.) But it is bullshit.
Watching a movie in which the crack dealer (another great performance by Anthony Mackie) maintains an even demeanor… even an honorable position… is a cool movie turn. And when he turns out young Drey (Ms Epps’ character) to deliver on her way to being a part of the dealing team, we worry for her, but the movie doesn’t ask us to hate him. He is doing the best he can in a bad, bad world.
Drey’s brother is in prison… but he gets a pass because he didn’t rat out his friends. Drey’s mom is working hard, so her lack of awareness and willingness to shake her finger about Drey seeing Frank (Mackie’s crack dealer) while also stashing his money in her purse is okay. Even Dan’s clumsily attempted rape late in the movie is excused by the film because he is lost and the woman was once a happy sexual partner of his.
In Half Nelson, it doesn’t matter why things are the way they are… they just are. And We (the collective we) are all victims of that reality. And we don’t have to answer for our sins because someone else is responsible for them… all of them.
I am not suggesting that a sympathetic portrait of addicts and inner city dwellers and crack dealers, etc, isn’t possible or dramatically valid. But what Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden have done here is to make a movie that turns, for instance, the Coppola/Scorsese view of the criminal world upside down.
In their mafia films, there is a warm center that reminds us that people in the mafia are still human beings, whether they are going through Shakespearian events or intimate ones. But we always come back to these powerful men being dealt blows that can be traced back to their own actions. And they all know that in the end, they are stone cold murderers.
The one character who gets near Half Nelson treatment is Don Vito Corleone (Brando), since we only see the early years and the end of his life. In the first film, Don Vito is the wise, old figure who has power and is staying out of wars in a well-defined universe. He is a charismatic and little he says ever seems to conflict with the audience’s idea of righteousness. But he is also the obvious leader of a criminal organization. This is his crack.
It isn’t until The Godfather II that we get into Don Vito’s roots. And even in the first film, there is no movie unless we get into what the father has brought into the life of his sons, his daughter, and the extended family. But Vito gets away surprisingly clean. (Dying helps with that.)
The difference between Don Vito and Half Nelson’s Dan is that Don Vito would never delude himself into thinking he was something other than what he was. Even Don Vito knows that he is in a world of his own creation.
There is a very telling piece of dialogue in Boden/Fleck’s script for Half Nelson. Dan is teaching his class, via a clip of Mario Savio’s famous speech on what became “The Savio Steps” at UC Berkeley, about how you have to put your body into the gears of “The Machine,” to make it stop:
Class Girl: Aren’t you the machine?
Dan: You’re saying I’m the machine?
Class Girl: You’re white… and private school.
Dan: Oh yeah, I guess you got me. Alright, so I’m part of the machine. But if I’m part of it, so are you. We all are.
In this small piece of dialogue, the filmmakers give up the game completely. And as an audience member, either you go there or you don’t.
Yes, in the broadest of terms, we are all part of The Machine.
But to quote “Dan” again, as he starts the discussion of what The Machine is: “Let’s say it’s a metaphor… he’s saying this machine is keeping me down… what is that… what’s keeping us from being free?”
Well, we can get into a long discussion about what “free” is, but let’s not.
In my worldview, my freedom is not the same freedom as a kid in a ghetto. The freedom that came from the opportunity inherent to my particular life changes the game too significantly for our situations to be equivalent. That is not to say that I can’t fall from my perch even faster than a person with nothing can rise to one higher than I came from. I believe in personal responsibility… and in the reality that the world is filled with varieties.
I do not believe that The Machine is keeping every single person frozen in place. Not at all. But there is a Machine and it is filled with dark corners that breed hopelessness and a sense of helplessness that make rising much, much harder.
Half Nelson is – as so many “Sundance films” are – a very skilled effort at having the cake and eating it too. It is loaded to the gills with the beauty of rebellion. I don’t think it is a coincidence that, even beyond the speech itself, that Mario Savio was the speaker since he was one of the few members of the 60s movements who never sold out, never sought fame, and didn’t appear to get twisted by middle age and the Reagan-era 80s.
Half Nelson is a movie that wants to believe that our heroes were/are oppressed and in response to that oppression, flawed in ways that can easily be forgiven.
In my eyes, a white man with a good brain a handsome face and a strong physique from a middle class family – even one who has drunks as parents – must have some very dark demons to be becoming a crackhead. Either that or he is weak on a very profound level. And I don’t really believe that he is a high-functioning crackhead, who wants to save the world, but is held back by The Machine. For all of the great acting and lovely stylization by Fleck as director, it is every bit as trite and obvious as To Sir With Love or any other classic feel bad/feel good movie. (And I love To Sir With Love, in part because it knows what it is and doesn't apologize.)
It’s been almost seven months since I first saw this film at Sundance and wrestled with my ambivalence. There is so much to like here. But I felt something rotten at the core. And when I revisited the film, I was hoping that I had just been in a mood or too surrounded by films that were proud of themselves for being edgy back then. But alas, no.
I am more appreciative of the style and the skill of Half Nelson than I was before. But that rotten core, which is most powerfully established in the first act, still kills the movie for me. It is similar to what I disliked about crash… it wasn’t the gimmick of coincidence, it was the glibness of every character having both a good and bad moment.
I have nothing against the idea that people who do bad things are not always bad people. That makes for great drama. But the drama of beautiful, pouty hero/victim? Save me!
It is the pretend political consciousness of this film that makes it painful to me. At least Savio fought the fight for a while and didn’t crumble into a whinny ball. (Savio also went across country, from NY to Berkeley, for college.) If someone tells me to “fight the power” only to show themselves to be unwilling to show any of the qualities – however many of them his/her DNA and circumstance foisted on them – needed to do that, I say, “See you when you get your shit together, pretender.” When a smart young black girl who has seen and synthesized the harsh reality of the world she has been born into teams up with a weak white man and somehow, it is suggested to us that he is party to her salvation, I get a little pissed.
Really, this whole thing feels like the start of a long, long, long discussion over many bottles of wine and a nearly DVD of the film for reference. But there is something about it that just keeps hitting me as racial patronizing and incredibly youthfully hopeful and, as clear minded as the film seems at times, incredibly caught in its own web.
Watch for Half Nelson to compete with Little Miss Sunshine to be the dominant force at the Indie Spirit Awards in February.
Posted by poland at 02:26 PM | Comments (22)
Video Of The Day - 8/14 - Tyger
Posted by poland at 07:00 AM | Comments (21)
August 13, 2006
Long Legs... If You're Deep Roy
There is a sub-class of releases that open decently, but then have unusually weak legs. Someone brought one of these titles up in another entry’s comment and so I went looking.
Here are the 74 movies that have opened over $10 million and not made it to more than 2.5 times that opening gross.
They are, in each category, in order of shortest legs to ”longest”:
10 Films That Opened Over $30 Million
Alien v Predator – 38
Madea’s Family Reunion – 30
Hulk – 62
The Ring Two -35
The Village – 51
Scary Movie 4 - 40
X-Men: The Last Stand - 103
8 Mile – 51
Scary Movie 3 – 48
Van Helsing – 52
16 Films That Opened $20m - $30m
Dawn of the Dead (27), When A Stranger Calls (21), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (23), Jarhead (28), Diary of a Mad Black Woman (22), Evolution: Underworld (27), Hide & Seek (22), Silent Hill (20), White Noise (24), The Chronicles of Riddick (24)
Underworld (22), Be Cool (23), Once Upon A Time In Mexico (23), Kingdom of Heaven (20), The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (21), Hostel (20)
48 Films That Opened Between $10 Million - $20 Million
ATL, Battlefield Earth, Elektra, Branagh’s Frankenstein, Blair Witch 2, Land of the Dead, Valentine, Aeon Flux, Queen of The Damned, Cradle 2 The Crave
xXx2, Psycho (remake), Mortal Combat: Annihilation, Stay Alive, Zathura, Biker Boyz, Pokemon 3, Dreamcatcher, Unleashed, Freddy v Jason
Resident Evil, Lady In The Water, The Avengers, The One, The Exorcist: The Beginning, 15 Minutes, Clerks II, Basic, Star Trek: Nemesis, Jeepers Creepers 2
Poetic Justice, Honey, Catwoman, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Sky Captain & The World of Tomorrow, Stealth, Random Hearts, Dumb & Dumberer, A Man Apart, The Punisher
Boogeyman, Little Nicky, The Lizzie Maguire Movie, What’s The Worst That Could Happen, Starship Troopers, The Missing, Stick It, The Big Hit
Posted by poland at 04:09 PM | Comments (5)
Jurassic Chaplin & The Temple Of Doom
ADDED - A bonus you may find funnier after the jump
Posted by poland at 03:55 PM | Comments (4)
Sunday Estimates by Klady - 8/13
Nothing much changed from yesterday.
Step Up proved just how powerfully spring loaded teen girls can be. The question now is whether they’ll be back.
The Talladega Nights number might be slightly high, but nothing bad either way for a movie with that big opening weekend.
Little kids have nothing to see but Barnyard.
World Trade Center did fine… now we’ll see how the word of mouth goes.
Pulse and The Descent seem poised to do a similar final domestic number, no matter how much the geeks love the latter and hate the former. A lesson to distributors?
The former FGME, Pirates 2, has now fallen behind Shrek 2, by $4.4 million after six weekends and $2.7 million after 38 days. Still, $400 million looms next weekend, taking a few days longer to get there than Shrek 2 and weeks faster than anything else.
===================================
3-Day Estimates | Weekend | % Change | Cume
Talladega Nights | 22.6 | -52% | 90.8
Step Up | 20.9 | - | 20.9
World Trade Center | 18.8 | - | 26.6
Barnyard | 10.2 | -36% | 34.2
Pulse | 8.3 | - | 8.3
Pirates: Dead Man's Chest | 7.2 | -35% | 392.4
Zoom | 4.5 | - | 4.5
Miami Vice | 4.5 | -56% | 55.0
The Descent | 4.2 | -52% | 17.2
Monster House | 3.3 | -45% | 63.7
Posted by poland at 10:04 AM | Comments (14)
August 12, 2006
Why Friedman Should Be Fired... Still
There are many journalistic hacks in this entertainment universe of ours... but Roger Friedman is the only one I continue to suggest deserves to be fired for being a liar and a con artist.
On Friday, just a day after this hackass passed along unfounded gossip as fact regarding Disney, LIonsgate and Apocalypto, Friedman explained...
"What the studio doesn't say is, no one wanted to take on the Gibson baggage with "Apocalypto." Disney is forced to honor its agreement with Gibson's Icon Productions. That's the way the cookie crumbles."
However, this is a second lie to make it look as though his first error - running gossip as fact - was not an error. Presumably, this is because Friedman got media traction on the story from the endless parade of journalists and web editors who didn't bother to check the word of a hack gossip who lives in the pocket of one mogul in particular.
It took less than two hours to get confirmation from airtight sources that the alleged deal was, in one of their turns of phrase, "bullshit." It simply never happened.
Of course, no one is going to sue a small-time hack like Friedman over a stupid lie like this. But Fox News, of all places, can't afford to have such an overt scammer working for them. They are already completely suspect without him. He is an embarrassment to this profession and anyone who references his reports without re-reporting whatever he claims to know deserves the embarrassment that comes with it.
In The Axis of Idiots, Friedman is not the craziest one or the angriest one, but he is the one who cares the least about the truth.
Posted by poland at 10:54 PM | Comments (40)
Suddenly Next Summer
GreenCine's David Hudon asked, "What movie are you most looking forward to in the summer of 2007?"
My answer...in part... "Dear God, what if Transformers does not make us all laugh until we choke on our own vomit? What will we do?"
Posted by poland at 10:18 PM | Comments (31)
Friday Estimates by Klady - 8/12
So the answers on Step Up are:
1)Tracking continues to be a mess
2) Teen girls continue to do what they want when they want to (see Take The Lead’s quiet $35 million too… opening day was half of Step Up’s)
3) This will be Disney’s third best opening of the year. And it fits their new profile.
4) The marketing was aggressive and obnoxious… Aviv knows what girls like.
The questions on Step Up are:
1) Can this audience be counted on at these numbers anytime soon again? There really hasn’t been an opening like this for one of these teen dance romances since Save The Last Dance… in 2001. Honey and You Got Served did okay, but both did less than half of STLD.
2) Did Channing Tatum get launched in She’s The Man (which also did more business than some thought). Was that a major step to getting here?
3) How long will the legs be?
Next…
We’ll see whether Talladega Nights’ drop holds through the weekend. No big surprise, one way or the other.
WTC goes anywhere between $17m & $20m for the 3-day… a neutral number. Word of mouth becomes the issue after this weekend. It’s a decent sampling of a couple of million people. We’ll see.
Pulse shows us, once again, that teen girls do what they want. Veronica Mars in a Grudge knock-off (for domestic consideration) doesn’t much fly. Still, it will be about the same opening as The Descent.
Barnyard continues to outperform very low expectations. Not by that much, but again, a market not reflected in tracking.
And Zoom is rejected on a level that was unexpected, even by those of us with the lowest expectations. Sony’s first commercial blemish this summer. Tim Allen in a Santa suit = money. Aside from that = not funny. Time for a career rethink.
====================================
Title | Friday | Screens | % Chg | Cume
Step Up | 8.5 | 2467 | - | 8.5
Talladega Nights | 7.2 | 3807 | -60% | 75.4
World Trade Center | 5.9 | 2957 | - | 13.7
Pulse | 3.4 | 2323 | - | 3.4
Barnyard | 3.2 | 3311 | -42% | 27.2
Pirates: Dead Man's Chest | 2.1 | 2941 | -36% | 387.3
Zoom | 1.5 | 2501 | - | 1.5
The Descent | 1.4 | 2095 | -58% | 14.3
Miami Vice | 1.4 | 2659 | -56% | 51.9
John Tucker Must Die | 1.1 | 2213 | -54% | 33.8
Posted by poland at 10:29 AM | Comments (52)
August 11, 2006
I Can't Explain Why...
... but I find this video oddly interesting and amusing... it's actually more intimate than any of those celebrity sex videos... and it ain't like there is any real news out there to discuss...
Posted by poland at 06:30 PM | Comments (22)
From Our Good Friends At Warner Bros...
Posted by poland at 05:57 PM | Comments (8)
Lunch With David V
Posted by poland at 10:50 AM | Comments (15)
29 Weeks To Oscar: The Year Of The Huh?
"The truth is, it doesn't look like there will be a clear theme for this year. There is a wide range of movies, though I have to say, there is a hell of a lot of history. Is this our best filmmakers' way of discussing today's politics without speaking directly to it? Perhaps. It seems to me that most of these films either have a happy ending or that Bobby Ewing in the shower, "it was all a dream" feel to them."
Posted by poland at 10:23 AM | Comments (53)
August 10, 2006
Peter O'Toole Makes A Run For Gold In Venus
A report on the film by Big Boy Baz Bamigboye...
Posted by poland at 01:02 PM | Comments (6)
WTC Opens
Only two summer releases this year – Superman Returns and the stunting Tuesday open of The Omen – opened wide on a day other than a Friday. World Trade Center makes three.
This makes yesterday’s roughly estimated (by Klady) $4.7m - $4.9 million opening almost impossible to read. We do know that it is not Superman Returns.
Looking back at 2005, there were three wide Wednesday openings: Batman Begins, Herbie: Fully Loaded, and The Sisterhood of Traveling Pants - $15 million, $2.7 million, $2.1 million. Again, a bit unclear.
Batman, obviously went on to gross more than $200 million. No one expected WTC to be in that game. Herbie at $66m and Traveling Pants at $39m are lower than WTC expectations. So it all fits. But it doesn’t tell us anything remotely definitive.
Paramount’s strategy, apparently, recognizes that the future of this film is with word of mouth, for better or for worse, and thus they opened the film on Wednesday to get enough of a sample out there to get word out that it is safe for people who are afraid of having this experience to go to the movies. Of course, that same word of mouth could tell some more clearly that it is unsafe to go. That is the gamble.
Look for somewhere around $25 million for 5 days. And then, the second weekend as the key – even more than most films - to tell us what the future of World Trade Center is going to be.
Posted by poland at 11:23 AM | Comments (10)
August 09, 2006
It Remains Quiet Out There...
What is the first fall movie you actually care about seeing?
AND - Has there ever been a trailer quite this A.D.D.?
Posted by poland at 10:37 PM | Comments (32)
A Mel Gibson Mash Up
Too long (isn't everything lately?), but funny... and amazingly dark...
Add, Wed 2:04p - The filmmaker behind this mock trailer prefers the iFilm version. Unfortunately, iFilm doesn't allow an embed.
Posted by poland at 12:05 PM | Comments (19)
What We Men Want
"Paragraph 1 - I have no interest in this movie because I hate Hollywood and all it stands for and if they made anything more dramatic than a documentary about 9/11, I am going to rip it a new asshole.
Paragraph 2 - I'm going to rip it a new asshole… and while I really hate it on principle, I'm going to rationalize my hatred as though I was still doing my job as a film critic."
Shoudl Ken Turan (and the many he represents) have review World Trade Center the movie or just stuck to their anger that World Trade Center wasn't political and, ultimately, anti-Bush?
Is World Trade Center the ultimate political movie because it might make clear yet again how Geirge W. Bush won reelection in spite of the war and a problem economy?
What is the role of a critic at a major daily?
Posted by poland at 09:59 AM | Comments (51)
WTC Reviews
Add, Wed 11:20a
Metacritic has WTC at a 68 Metascore
Interestingly, there was 20 ratings of 100 for United 93 and not a single WTC rating over 90.
Calling Oliver Stone!
Update 10:09a Wed
87 total reviews on RT
23 Cream of The Crop
20 Positive, 3 Negative – 88% ripe
64 Non-Cream –
41 Positive, 23 Negative - 64% ripe
======================================
(corrected)
88% positive Cream Of The Crop
61% positive Everyone Else
What do you think it means?
Posted by poland at 02:02 AM | Comments (25)
August 08, 2006
Anyone? Anyone?
Nice day... 'bout 79 degrees... had fish for lunch... yeah... Reggie White got inducted into the Hall of Fame... good for him... 50 bombs on Israel... uh huh... well, if I nap during the day, I might have a hard time sleeping.... yeah... look, a birdie on my porch... uh huh...
Posted by poland at 05:35 PM | Comments (24)
Poll Position
The Los Angeles Times Is two days into their four days of teen polling and it still feels a lot to me like they have some poor polling technique in play (based on the questions, which are in turn leading or vague), journalists trying to determine the meaning of numbers, and selective quoting to find one kid here or there to match their conclusions.
But maybe I am being harsh.
What do you think?
Posted by poland at 10:46 AM | Comments (15)
August 07, 2006
I Went To The WTC Junket And All I Got Was This Lousy Attitude
The annual "I'm Not A Professional Writer, But WOW, Those Press Junkets Are Wacky” story turns up via a blogger named Eric D. Snider.
It’s odd when anyone ever suggests that a studio have been victimized, but I have to say, I am not a big believer on taking someone else’s hospitality so that you can crap all over them for inviting you in the first place.
There are all kinds of things that are wrong about the junket system. And ironically, World Trade Center touring to major cities to speak to regional journalists is the antithesis of that. These tours, that are happening more and more, are representative of a move towards the old school idea of how to deal with press. It is still a machine, but it is a much more intimate machine. And in cities like Chicago – and probably Seattle too – it allows local press to get one-on-one time that would be much harder to schedule if everyone is congregating in one city over 3 days and that’s that. (The reason the tours don't happen more is that talent and their personal reps won't allow it.)
Well, the result of Mr. Snider trying, somewhat hamfistedly (the word “whore” loses its effect after the 73rd use in one piece), to take the piss out of Paramount and the entire junket system is Paramount and their Seattle/Portland rep taking Snider off their screening lists.
The odd thing for me is that I am the first to question the validity of the Earl Dittmans of the world (Earl is a nice guy, but dear sweet baby Jesus), but Snider’s piece wasn’t really about the junket system. In fact, when push comes to shove, his predisposition against the junket in the form of assuming all dumb gossip questions, is negated and he seems okay with the journalists involved (though he still keeps calling them whores).
Mostly, he thinks the whole thing is a gaudy waste of money.
Well, did he ask?
Does he know that the Four Seasons in Los Angeles rebuilt the second floor of the hotel to make it work more effectively for TV and thus, to bring that business to the hotel? Does he know how much the studios actually pay for rooms? Did he think about a career of traveling to N.Y., L.A. or somewhere else every single weekend for a year or two or ten and what that work – yes, they are all paid by outlets to deliver all that fluff – does to the spirit and family life? And that while the hotel rooms can be a bit much, has he found a cheap hotel in downtown Seattle that can accommodate the studio’s needs for an event like this?
And where does he get off deciding what the value of these junkets are to the studios? Does he think, as each studio seems to fire some more people every couple of quarters, that no one is doing cost/value analysis at junkets?
I did have an experience like this once. It was a studio junket in Hawaii. And I did write extensively about the movie I was there to cover. But I also wrote about how wild the junket itself got. And I don’t think I was pissing on those who I wrote about. But they were embarrassed. And I understood (in time). Even though my intent was to say, “What a great time they were offering us,” and even if it was a form of full disclosure on my part… it was a glimpse behind the curtain that I was not invited to offer. I was not there as an investigative journalist. If what I wrote about was really journalistically important (if, say, I witnessed an overt pay-off or sexual harrassment or something serious), I think I would have been 100% justified in writing about it. But to amuse myself? No. To make myself feel like I had been less "taken care of?" No.
Ironically, the one person that Snider doesn’t call out by name is the one person who deserved to be called out: He writes:
“(Let me jump forward in time a couple days to quote what one of the Web site writers posted on his site's gossipy blog regarding this roundtable with Stone: "[I] just finished up lunch with the director -- a plate of fruit and cheese, and crackers -- none of which Stone touched, he just wanted his coffee -- and learned that Stone has decided to release a director's director's cut of 'Alexander.'" "Lunch with the director" makes it sound like he sat one-on-one with Stone and chatted over lunch, doesn't it? And I'm sure that was the point: to make it sound like this guy had lunch with Oliver Stone, to impress you. When in fact this guy shared a table with a half-dozen other people, and the only one having lunch was Stone. [It's true Stone didn't actually eat anything; that part wasn't a lie.])”
A journalist actually lied – a small lie, mind you – about the circumstances of an interview. But that person – who turns out to be Tim Nasson of WildAboutMovies.com – broke a real ethical rule. Even more amazingly, Nasson (who I don’t think I’ve ever met) continues to be in business with Paramount in spite of printing gossip about Oliver Stone smoking pot, complaining about a cancelled WTC junket in Phoenix and then positioning the studio’s explanation as inside information, and then writing snarkily about Nic Cage leaving an interview after being asked about his love life. So how is he still studio safe?
Of course, there is freedom of the press – even internet press – and Cage is infamously thin-skinned about personal questions, but it is an interesting piece of hypocrisy on both Snider’s part (protecting Nassan) and Paramount’s (continuing to embrace Nasson while kicking Snider to the curb). I guess it is an "all politics are local" situation. Paramount has an ongoing relationship with Nasson, so he is forgiven for his infractions and Snider appears to see him as a fellow renegade - I guess - so he doesn't call him out by name. Still...
Again, there are so many problems with the junket system, as much at Paramount as anywhere else. But this kind of piece is nothing but spitting in the face of someone who offered you an opportunity. The hotel and the air travel and the per diem is part of that opportunity. If you’re going to say, “yes,” it seems to me that if you have serious concerns about how that opportunity is laid out, the honorable thing is simply to say “no” the next time. If you didn't know what you were getting into, then learn the reality and tell all your friends, but keep your ignorance to yourself and off the internet. And if you really need to write about it, you owe your host at least the respect of doing a serious job of reporting on what you object to in the system.
I don’t think Snider lived up to that standard. But maybe you do…
Posted by poland at 04:24 PM | Comments (54)
The Ebert Update
This update came from Chaz Ebert today....
Dear Readers:
We have been getting many requests asking for an update on Roger's health, and so here it is. First of all he THANKS YOU! so very much for continuing to visit the website, watching Ebert & Roeper, and for sending so many messages with get-well wishes and messages about continuing thoughts and prayers for him. That means so much to him and to us.
Roger was making good progress and was ready to go to his next phase of treatment, which would have been physical therapy to regain his strength. Well last night Roger had minor surgery, so today, as you can
imagine, he feels a bit less cheerful. The doctors remain optimistic about his recovery, however, and say that the physical therapy will be delayed for only a few days.
As I said before, the most frustrating aspect is that his progress is not always linear. But the doctors told us right from the start to expect this non-linear recovery. They said that there will bumps in the road along the way that seem like setbacks, and then he will reach a point where he will make a rapid recovery. Darn that surgery! Please excuse me if I don't sound like my usual cheerleader self, but if you had seen him last week, even yesterday, when he was doing so well. We were secretly back to using his computer. He wanted to surprise everyone with messages.
He has been so interested in the outside world, including the war and global warming; his various tv, newspaper and internet enterprises, and his new book, "Awake In The Dark," which will be published this fall by the University of Chicago Press. The doctors and nurses have been absolutely charmed by his witty personality. And he continues to entertain them with the eclectic music he downloaded on his iPod.
To concentrate on the positives, however, I am encouraged by his vital signs which are all stable. (Again that word that I have come to love so much.) And so I know that we still have much to be grateful for. They say that Roger is very strong and has weathered this all very well. (I say its times for a little less weather and more sun.) As Mother Theresa has said: ""God never gives us more than we can handle. But sometimes I wish he didn't trust us so much."
Please keep sending healing thoughts Roger's way and your best prayers for a speedy recovery. And I know it sounds corny to some, but please keep visualizing him enveloped by warm, bright, healing light! That, along with Roger's medical dream team, should ensure his full recovery.
Many thanks,
Chaz Ebert
Posted by poland at 03:13 PM | Comments (4)
August 06, 2006
That Wacky International Box Office
Excerpted foreign box office info from Variety...
It was the biggest overseas weekend yet for "Dead Man's Chest," which has cumed $392 million in foreign coin, exceeding the domestic gross by $12 million to hit $772 million worldwide.
With 17% of foreign markets not yet open -- including Spain and Germany -- "Chest" will likely pass "Finding Nemo" at $865 million worldwide in a few more weeks to become Disney's top performer in combined grosses.
"Superman Returns" remained on a far lower trajectory, with $7.1 million from more than 5,100 prints in 55 markets, lifting the foreign cume to $146 million and the worldwide take to $336 million.
"Superman Returns" had been expected to provide a one-two punch with "Dead Man's Chest" in foreign markets, but the Man of Steel has shown only modest traction and the international cume for the pricey tentpole is now just 37% of "Chest," while the worldwide is 43% of "Chest."
UIP's first major foreign launches of "Miami Vice" put the arm on $7 million at 1,275 playdates in 11 markets, led by a respectable first-place U.K. opening with $4 million at 406 and 20% share. Debuts were more moderate in Mexico with $950,000 at 336, good enough for third place, and in Russia with $750,000 at 230.
"Vice" has 44 foreign markets left, with Australia next on Thursday, followed by France Aug. 16.
ADD, Sun, 10:48p - A Reader writes in to say, "The article you just posted about Pirates International box office numbers from Variety has an error. It says " With 17% of the foreign market not yet open- Including Spain and Germany." I believe they meant Italy as it has already opened in Germany as of July 27th."
I don't actually know what the answer is, but it seems reasonable to note the question mark on the detail. DP
Posted by poland at 10:04 PM | Comments (17)
Sunday Estimates by Klady
Not a lot more to say, is there?
Miami Vice’s 62% drop is painful and suggests that the film will have to struggle to $60 million domestic. Universal will hope that the film finds life overseas. The domestic total won’t cover the P&A, much less the nine-figure budget. Michael Mann is truly a world class filmmaker… but his films are not box office worldbeaters and he should have endless access to money, so long as his budgets stay under $80 million.
Last weekend’s other opening also go smashed by Nascar, with John Tucker Must Die already an afterthought and Ant Bully getting sand kicked in its face.
Who would have guessed in May that Miami Vice, Lady in the Water and Ant Bully combined would make less domestically than The Devil Wears Prada?
The Descent did decent, but no better.
Little Miss Sunshine did great again, this time on 58 screens. The question is how long Fox Searchlight can extend the film’s rollout and still maintain heat.
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Weekend (estimates) August 4 - 6, 2006
Rank | Title | Gross (average) | % change | Theaters | Cume
1 | Talladega Nights | 47.6 (12,520) | 3803 | 47.6
2 | Barnyard | 15.7 (4,740) | 3311 | 15.7
3 | Pirates of Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest | 11.0 (3,190) | -47% | 3436 | 379.7
4 | Miami Vice | 9.7 (3,190) | -62% | 3026 | 45.7
5 | The Descent | 8.6 (4,120) | 2095 | 8.6
6 | John Tucker Must Die | 6.0 (2,320) | -58% | 2566 | 28.5
7 | Monster House | 5.9 (1,960) | -49% | 3029 | 56.9
8 | Ant Bully | 3.8 (1,240) | -55% | 3050 | 18
9 | You, Me and Dupree | 3.7 (1,620) | -48% | 2266 | 66.9
10 | The Night Listener | 3.5 (2,590) | 1367 | 3.5
11 | The Devil Wears Prada | 3.1 (2,120) | -34% | 1453 | 112.7
12 | Lady in the Water | 2.7 (1,020) | -62% | 2670 | 38.6
14 | Superman Returns | 2.1 (1,250) | -44% | 1710 | 190.2
17 | Little Miss Sunshine | 1.5 (25,690) | 302% | 58 | 2.2
20 | Cars | 1.0 (1,040) | -63% | 942 | 237.4
22 | An Inconvenient Truth | .58 (1,810) | -22% | 346 | 21.2
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Sony is reporting a $47 million opening for Talladega Nights, the 2nd Biggest Original comedy opening of all time behind Bruce Almighty.
It is Will Ferrell's biggest opening ever. It is Sony Pictures 8th #1 Movie and 9th film $20 million opeinng on 2006. The perevious record was Fox's 6 $20m openings in a year.
53% of the audience was male and 52% was under 25.
Sony will take over the #1 spot in marketshare later this week, the 5th consecutive year to pass a billion dollars in domestic ticket sales, a mark only one other studio can match.
In other Sony news, Monster House did $6M this weekend, Little Man did $2.5M and Click did $775K.
Posted by poland at 09:52 AM | Comments (54)
August 05, 2006
Brain Twister...
Merissa Marr does a good, free Wall Street Journal story on World Trade Center, but closes with...
"Pre-release audience research suggests that the movie is indeed drumming up interest from a broad audience. However, research on a sensitive subject can be unreliable. Respondents may have felt a need to be patriotic when answering questions about whether they actually would see the movie."
Does anyone recall a movie that was tracking significantly better than it opened because people felt compelled to support it in research, but not in reality?
There were certainly movies like An American President and Power and Bulworth and Primary Colors and even United 93, which drew a lot of media interest and greater expectations. But I don't recall any of these being movies that the studios had strong indications of commercial success on - aside from high test scores - and which then failed to open.
Interestingly, Oliver Stone’s biggest domestic opening was Alexander’s $13.7 million and his highest grosser domestically since Platoon was Any Given Sunday’s $76 million, though JFK played best in the world market, totaling $205 million worldwide. If you believe tracking, Stone is about to double his best opening ever.
But the point of this entry… anyone out there remember a case where the indicators were this commercial and thus, misleading because people were more anxious than honest in telling pollsters that they were going to see the movie?
Posted by poland at 03:51 PM | Comments (20)
Why Talladega Plays To Its "Victims"
If someone tells you Talladega Nights is hateful, look at the hatred of the source.
It is very much like a friend making fun of you versus an adversary making fun of you. Both can tell you that the same thing is wrong with you, but the impact is so very different.
The reason why TN will play in the south, like Hee-Haw and massively successful The Blue Collar Comedy Tour, is that people like to have their stereotypes thrown in their face by people from whom they feel a level of love, not hate. Only an arrogant jackass would suggest that large groups are too stupid to know they are being made fun of. The fact is, this group shows its self-awareness and confidence by being completely fine with the jokes.
Power doesn't scream.
The same is true of Tyler Perry's work. These shows are not complimentary to the black community. But they are reflective of the weakest and strongest parts of the less assimilated black experience in America. Aunt Jemima is an insult. That image is loaded with the assumption of a culture that does not respect black Americans. But Perry can shuck and jive in a dress and it is truly beloved. Who rages against Perry? Paternalistic white Americans and assimilated, we’re–just-like-“them” black Americans. Perry’s works are loaded with love and schmaltz and good messages and dark stereotypes that are funny because they are true… and not.
This is also why The Daily Show thrives on a much smaller scale... and is only a hit amongst the in-the-know types. It makes fun of "us." We are the rubes, as much as the subjects that are mocked. Because we consume the "real news" each day. And we are embarrassed by that consumption. And The Daily Show tells "us" we are suckers. And "we" love it.
Or look at the teen comedies, like Mean Girls or John Tucker Must Die. “You’re such a slut,” speaks to girls who sleep around... an insult one moment and a badge of pride the next. By the end of these films, the slutty girls seem to take that badge on themselves.
And Borat… it is the innocence of that character – as well as our awareness that Sacha Baron Cohen is underneath there somewhere, even though he never winks at the camera once – that makes him beyond the stereotypes he throws out like a million grains of rice onto a plate. The “Running of the Jews” is hateful on its face… but it makes fun both of jews and anti-semites and jewish self-importance and cultural differences and, with the giant Mardi Gras heads, the silliness of it all… all in one gathered moment.
Borat is far nastier than Talladega Nights. But watch those who thought that TN was abusive of southerners LOVE Borat… because it is a broad enough canvas that of hate (and real humor) that it is safer for the self-proclaimed intellectuals. The real question will be, will it play for adults in the deep south and midwest?
Posted by poland at 10:59 AM | Comments (34)
Klady's Friday Estimates - 8/4/06
Country will kick the pundit’s ass twice this weekend. Talladega Nights will be in the mid-40s to the mid-50s for the weekend. Barnyard will be over $14 million, which was the highest estimate the BO Hell group came up with.
What does this show? 1. It’s been a crappy summer for comedies and Talladega looked funny to people… opening to more than Little Man and You, Me & Dupree combined when they opened on the same weekend. The audience is ready and waiting for these films. (P.S. Fox has been very specific in letting me know that Borat is still being edited, even as it screens weekly, and that it wasn’t ready for summer release… but had it been… HUGE!)
2. The same is true of young children. The dream is always Shrek 2 4-quadrant numbers, but as we saw with the surprisingly strong Over The Hedge and the leggy Cars, this audience needs somewhere to go. Barnyard had strong numbers during the day yesterday and will have stronger numbers today and tomorrow (though will likely to crap numbers at night). And that is enough for at least a strong start for a movie of low expectations.
The Descent proved the real reason that Lions Gate was associating the movie with Saw and Quentin Tarantino Presents Hostel… their tracking was light and they needed to find a way to get the attention of those who filled the coffers for those crappy horror films. I found the hysteria in some press stories about the violence… well, hysterical. The answer will be a little over $9 million… which was about where it was discussed all week last week.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest 2 lost screens for the first time this weekend and will drop harder than it has dropped before. It’s still the FGME by about $9 million after 22 days and will still be in the lead after the weekend. But by the end of weekend, comparisons after Weekend Five, will see it fall behind Shrek 2 for the first time. P2 will get to $400 million, but it:
Passed the other POTC (Passion of the Christ) on Friday to become the 10th highest domestic grosser ever
Will pass #9 Spider-Man 2 today or tomorrow
Will overtake #8 LOTR: Return of the King by mid-week
And will grab the #7 slot from Star Wars/Sith before the end of next weekend.
The leap from Sith to #5 The Phantom Menace is $27 million. It’s not clear – and perhaps unlikely – that P2 will make that leap. (I would argue that all of these numbers are one too high, as the original Star Wars added $138 million in its 20th anniversary re-issue and that seven of the Top Ten were released within the last 7 years.)
Worldwide, P2 passes Forrest Gump today for the #23 al-time slot.
Miami Vice and John Tucker Must Die both suffered from a combination of Talladega and second Friday percentage blues.
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Title | Distributor | Gross * | Theaters | % Change | Cume
Talladega Nights | Sony | 18.3 | 3803 | New | 18.3
Barnyard | Par | 5.5 | 3311 | New | 5.5
The Descent | Lions Gate | 3.3 | 2095 | New | 3.3
Pirates 2: Dead Man's Chest | BV | 3.3 | 3436 | -45% | 372
Miami Vice | Uni | 3.1 | 3026 | -65% | 39.2
John Tucker Must Die | Fox | 2.3 | 2566 | -62% | 24.9
Monster House | Sony | 1.9 | 3029 | -48% | 52.8
The Ant Bully | WB | 1.2 | 3050 | -53% | 15.5
The Night Listener | Miramax | 1.2 | 1367 | New | 1.2
You, Me and Dupree | Uni | 1.2 | 2266 | -48% | 64.4
Posted by poland at 09:58 AM | Comments (13)
August 04, 2006
Another.... Apology
Saturday, 10:05a - My apologies to Richard Roeper.
Actually, I don't believe Richard was always on the right. I can only assume Roger shifted seats after the last medical issues. He was always on the left before.
Still, he did make that movie at some point. And Richard is still in Richard's seat.
And yes, it is a very big deal in EbertLand. And it was a very, very big deal in SiskelLand. Also a big deal was the issue of whether the thumbs would be used in Roger's absence. (They will.) Roger & Gene own the copyright on the two thumbs up, not Disney.
In any case, I reacted to the history I remembered and experienced, which you guys (readers) made clear has changed. My apologies again to Richard.
EARLIER - Roeper moves to Roger's side of the aisle... as if... sickening.
Posted by poland at 11:09 PM | Comments (32)
Lunch With David IV - August 4
If you have problems with this embed, click here
Posted by poland at 03:00 PM | Comments (8)
Box Office Hell - August 4
Posted by poland at 12:07 PM | Comments (31)
Chasing The Franchise
With the announcement that they had picked up Hellboy 2 With Guillermo del Toro - this pleases me - and the greenlight for The Incredible Hulk - more curious than pleased - Universal has affirmed its interest in finding franchise films that the studio has lacked since Steven Spielberg delivered the Back To The Future and Jurassic Park series.
Is this good or bad? And what other franchise possibilities, either failed or ancient (in movie time), would you like to see revived... or at least thing it would be good business to ressurect? Which would be terrible choices?
Posted by poland at 10:19 AM | Comments (67)
August 03, 2006
Summer Replacement Columnist
Scott Feinberg sent this in with the comment, "I just couldn't resist sending you this attachment of two photos that look eerily similar---I hope you get a kick out of it."
I did.
Posted by poland at 01:20 PM | Comments (15)
20 Wks - The 10 Mistakes Of Summer
The odd thing about doing this column is realizing how few real mistakes were really made this summer. There were movies that shouldn't have been made… but I point out only two because how can you really call a movie like The Break-Up a mistake because most critics (including me) don't like it when it made almost $120 million. That is no mistake.
I'm going to make this list in no order because I really can't say what the biggest mistake really was. How do you compare a date pile-up and a film that was budgeted too high for its own good? So let's start with…
Posted by poland at 11:32 AM | Comments (19)
In-Blog Note
This isn't really an entry for mass consumption, but for those of you who post regularly, Joe Leydon is a familiar name. Joe's dad, Michael, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 83.
Joe wrote about it here.
And if you wish to send condolences to Joe, his e-mail address is JoeLeydon@earthlink.net.
Posted by poland at 12:55 AM | Comments (15)
August 02, 2006
Can You Hear That Pin Drop?
It's funny how all of Hollywood's media outlets - journalistic, gossip, and other - are now like an aging man who just brought his side of the sweet, sweet love to fruition... just rolling its big ass over and falling dead asleep while its partner remains unsatisfied and wondering, "Was that all there was?"
Yes, that's all there was. Time to see if Lindsay Lohan will get caught driving without panties or theorizing whether Oren Aviv will be called up to serve in the Israeli military or why (weep,weep) movies (sniff, sniff) are so bad (SOB!!!) in this era.
Maybe there is a reason other than global warming why the weather in L.A. has felt like hell on earth lately and seems to have subsided as soon as Mel Gibsonofgod got arrested.
Here’s a clue: A truly good story has more than 3 days in it.
Posted by poland at 06:36 PM | Comments (54)
The New Oscars Are Here.. The New Oscars Are Here!
Navin Johnson would be proud of us, kicking off the Oscar season this early. But given that campaigning has begun in earnest, it seems like gettng an early read 30 weeks out is a good idea. (Jack Mathews best expressed the exercise with an "oy.")
With 12 of us on board, only 6 films got as many as 6 votes... the big question, to be answered after Toronto, is will the list get deeper or shallower?
Posted by poland at 12:33 PM | Comments (35)
August 01, 2006
Looks Like A Press Kit, Eats Like An Oscar Launch
The Oscar season unofficially started last Wednesday with L.A.'s first post-Cannes screening of Paramount Vantage's Babel.
Then, on Monday, this package for Universal's The Black Dahlia arrived on my doorstep. Spiffy, eh?
Photos of the rest of the kit after the jump...
Posted by poland at 03:07 PM | Comments (29)
The New Musical... SILENCE!
Click here to hear a key 2nd act song.... just beautiful. (it takes a minute to load the mp3)
And then go here to get the whole picture.
Posted by poland at 12:00 AM | Comments (4)