May 07, 2008
Speed Racer Review
Dancing on the cutting edge is a unique challenge. Just pushing the envelope can draw attention, but as we often see, it is really easy to get caught up in simply stunting.
The Wachowski Bros have turned expectations upside down in four of their five films so far. First, in Bound, they pushed the lipstick lesbian into a studio movie before anyone else, with a lot of flash and style (the style not being as breakthrough, as it was reminiscent of some of The Coens’ work.) The Matrix defined action for years after its release, melding Asian cinema with kink and American grime (with an Australian accent). And while there were some critical brickbats, The Matrix Reloaded pushed the envelope even further in new ways, building image creation ideas that still have not been topped.
And now, Speed Racer.
Speed Racer spins some people’s heads right near off their axis. But to be unable to see the complexity of the imagery is to fail to appreciate the depth of what The Wachowskis are doing here.
The Matrix took a lot of ideas from Japanese anime’, but kept its feet on the ground, allowing for the fantastical, but keeping most of the film in the mind’s eye of real people. The first rule of Speed Racer is that we live in a world of all kinds of visceral inputs and we have learned to leap from one to another… why can’t we do that in a movie?
The actors are real, including the scene-stealing monkey, Chim-Chim. But very little else, except the pancakes, is. And while the racing scenes – which is probably most of what you’ve seen, if you haven’t yet seen the film – are exciting and brain-straining and have what, to me, is the desired movie effect… they have you shifting with the vehicles in your movie seats… it is the more intimate sequences that are at the heart of Speed Racer.
You will know whether this is a movie that will stay in your heart early on, when young Speed imagines himself racing. I won’t give away what the imagery of the scene is, but if you find yourself as charmed as delighted as I did, put on your seatbelt, because you’re in for a great ride.
The story is simple. The Racer family is Pops and Mom and Rex and Speed. They are one of the last truly independent racing teams in the world. Speed, like Rex before him, is recognized as one of the great emerging drivers in the world. Will they sell out to the massive corporation… or not?
That’s pretty much it.
But you are already into some strong stuff, because The Wachowskis are not satisfied to make a simple action racing movie. The moral dilemma of good and evil and how you choose to live your life is there in every frame. For some, it’s redemption. For others, it is proving themselves. And for others, it is about holding onto ideals so tightly that they have lost perspective. And they aren’t shy about embracing the power of love in their film. The love of parents for their children, children for their parents, sexy but not sexual love between young men and women, and the love of family in general are at the heart of this film. There is no winning of The Race just to win a race. The stakes are high and then higher and then higher again.
The core of it all is family love and commitment. Speed Racer is, amazingly, a Pixar film with a bit more aggression. But if you felt it as Marlin went to find Nemo or were elated when Remy’s family came to save his butt in the most unexpected way in Ratatouille, you will feel The Racers.
Then there are the bad guys.
In a cartoon universe of bright colors and impossible physics, it is hard to create a villain that can not only talk a lot, but can break through the visual clutter. The Wachowskis do it by, again, raising the stakes.
And really… who can resist ninjas?
Did I mention... Speed Racer is a whole lot of fun.
You could complain about the car not looking like they are of a realistic weight (they look at lot more so in IMAX), but that complain loses relevance when you realize – as you have to – that reality is not where these races live. They are you and your best friend playing with Matchbox cars on a rainy Saturday, racing and smashing and crashing all over.
The fights are the same way. And the same way one of you would inevitably play a little too hard and smash a toe or slam your head into the wall or otherwise do Boy Damage, your mom and dad are there to make you feel better when you do… only it’s Speed’s Mom and Pops. Spritle and Chim-Chim are everyone’s irritating precocious brothers. Trixie is every boy’s fantasy of a girl who is loving and sexy and able to handle a wrench when need be.
And did I mention, the visuals will blow you away. You truly have never seen anything like it before. And just when you think it’s too much, some new idea comes flying at you and you are blown away all over again.
The Wachowskis did what all smart filmmakers who are looking for a way to bring familiar music alive and renewed do. They hired Michael Giacchino, who takes the themes of the cartoon and makes them both familiar and new to us, while adding plenty of his own new music. And the credit sequence, as in most of Giacchino’s films, is a treasure trove of stuff that didn’t fit into the film, but is well worth the sit through many, many credits. In this case, that includes a new version of the old theme and a pop tune built around the Japanese version of the original theme.
The cast is pretty much perfection. Emile Hirsch brings a light touch to Speed. The Christina Ricci/Susan Sarandon similarity in looks as Trixie and Mom makes for some good Oedipal goofiness than no kid will ever get. Who else but John Goodman could be Pops Racer? And Paulie Litt is a perfect Spritle, but equally good are the kids who play Young Speed and Young Trixie, Nicholas Elia and Ariel Winter.
There is a great cast outside of the family as well. Matthew Fox kills as Racer X, embodying the stiffness of the cartoon character. Roger Allam, who you might recall from V for Vendetta, is the smiling snake oil billionaire, Mr. Royalton. And The Wachowskis fill the film with international familiar/unfamiliar faces, like Moritz Bleibtreu, Richard Roundtree, Togo Igawa, the original She-Devil Julie Wallace, and Korean pop-star Rain.
But it is The Wachowskis who are the stars of Speed Racer. Their use of the virtual camera is well beyond anything we have ever seen in a movie theater before. The topper to that virtuosity, however, is the most shocking thing about Speed Racer… it’s a truly great family film, even if it is 10 minutes too long. It’s a sweet CG treat in a retro summer. While there is zero question that it will be burning up TV screens in family homes for decades to come, I actually think that it will stick with adults of discretion long after the stomach ache of sweetness wears off.
Posted by poland at 11:09 AM | Comments (5)
May 05, 2008
The Billion Dollar Paramount '08 Illusion
Paramount is not the first studio to suffer their success. But we are getting a wave of spin from a few voices that seems to be deep in the bag with the denizens of Melrose.
Here’s the deal…
Go back to 1999… Fox releases The Phantom Menace. It “won” the summer, grossing $138 million more domestically than any other film. But all Fox had the rest of the way was Lake Placid and Brokedown Palace, a breakeven comedy and a red ink drama. A $472 million summer meant net revenues for the studio of about $50 million… and roughly another $50 million from Star Wars’ international release.
In 2001, Fox had Planet of the Apes and Disney had Pearl Harbor. The Apes did around $180 million domestic and Pearl just under $200m. Apes barely broke even in DVD and Pearl Harbor was saved by international box office with another $250m… but just barely. It, too, needed Home Entertainment to get out of the red.
(Ed Note: 5/6/08: The graph above was edited to reflect a $20 million mistake on the Pearl Harbor domestic gross.)
Sony’s billion dollar summer of 2002 – Spider-Man was a cash cow. But Men in Black II carried such a weighty burden of gross point players and an expensive pricetag that $450 million worldwide didn’t come close to making it profitable. Stuart Little II was so expensive that when it didn’t hit, it drained cash from the company. And Revolution Studio’s heavily hyped xXx managed only $277 worldwide… which left it gasping for every ancillary dime to hover near breakeven.
2003 - Terminator 3, Bad Boys 2, Hulk, and Charlie’s Angels 2 were all $100 million domestic grossers that were extremely expensive and/or had big gross players and may or may not have hit black.
2006 – Warner Bros became the poster child for avoiding trouble by selling off the costs of production to funding organizations. Superman Returns lost over $50 million… but not for Warner Bros. They sold off half the huge production budget then collected their distribution fees and marketing fees before any money went back to production, covering their part of the loss. The sold off at least half of Poseidon. The also covered their butts via Legendary, in the cases of Lady In The Water, The Ant Bully, and Beerfest.
You might remember that it was only a few years ago when Sherry Lansing and financial architect Jon Dolgen were getting creamed in the media for not risking enough, finding financial partners on pretty much every single movie they made for Paramount.
That complaint could emerge again this summer, as their four biggest likely grossers this summer are all deals that will not be terribly profitable for the studio.
First up is Iron Man. Marvel stock rose almost 10% today. Paramount’s part of the split Viacom stock? Down 2.6%.
Why? Because Marvel funded the film and Paramount will make no profit except for a distribution fee.
Indiana Jones? Funded by Paramount, but to get the movie made, they gave away 87.5% of the movie to Lucas/Spielberg/Ford after breakeven. So if the film makes $500 million worldwide, no one makes anything, except for Paramount’s and the producers’ overhead costs. But if the film makes $1 billion worldwide, Paramount will make about $70 million, while L/S/F takes home over $450 million. And this is before DVD and other ancillaries.
Kung Fu Panda is DreamWorks Animation. Paramount has a 10% distribution fee (which they paid to get) coming to them… and that’s it. So if the film matches a movie like Madagascar and does $500 million worldwide? $50 million to Paramount… hundreds of millions to DreamWorks animation.
And Tropic Thunder, which is one of the most dangerous of the films in play, a broad comedy with a production cost of just around $100 million, is a DreamWorks film made with Viacom money. So if this film can find profitability… which is a question mark… Ben Stiller will be eating a nice percentage of the back end. (If the film does Dodgeball business, $170 million worldwide, it is still a question mark to break even, even with DVD.)
(Graph above edited for budget and gross players, 5/6)
So… if these four films were to actually push Paramount distribution up over $2 billion in worldwide grosses for the summer, the studio is looking at around $150 million in net revenues.
$2 billion is an impressive number. Less than 10% profit on that number, which is about as good as it gets on a macro level, is not.
Success and failure in the film business is not being terribly well reported these days. The big story is, as it has been for a couple of years now, that the multinationals that own the studios are getting out of the business of funding movies. There is too much risk there, while distribution and marketing is profitable, even if the movie is a loser.
The trick is to own the movies that the studio feels are near-locks outright. This is Warners’ great success on Harry Potter. Not only does it generate a gross of at least $800 million worldwide each time, but they own the franchise, with only the author getting a big bite. That said, Warners has been selling off a lot of stuff as well. This summer’s The Dark Knight is split with Legendary.
Disney has one split, Prince Caspian and one owned film (though it’s Pixar, so there are probably some personal points in play), Wall-E.
And Sony stands to have the movie that is most profitable for any studio this summer with Hancock, which they own outright, though Will Smith and James Lassiter’s Overbrook Entertainment will eat a big piece of the gross… though not nearly as much as on Indy.
In fact, Sony has the real chance of being the most profitable studio of the summer while not being close to the top in gross. They have Hancock. They have Adam Sandler, whose box office clout and limits the company knows quite well. Step Brothers was made on a tight budget. And they have two lower budget films with a lot of potential upside in The House Bunny and Pineapple Express.
And that, in the end, is the game. Amy Pascal learned this lesson years ago. You don’t give up everything for an image success. Profits first. All else is publicity.
Posted by poland at 09:30 PM | Comments (0)
May 04, 2008
Is Hollywood Stepford Or Just Doing Business?
It seems like we all need a reminder of some of the basic rules of Hollywood… again. I will proceed down that track at another time, but the thought hitting my brain pan today is this one…
Hollywood is neither monolithic nor terribly interested in the content of what they sell.
The brilliant – and that is a straight forward compliment – Manohla Dargis makes this miscalculation extravagantly in her “Where are the women at?” piece in the Summer Preview at The New York Times this weekend.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with pointing out that there is, as there has been for year after year, a dearth of movies with female leads in the summer season. Never mind the ironic truth that this summer has more women in lead roles than has been the norm, as Hollywood chases – 2 summers later – the The Devil Wears Prada dollars that they didn’t believe were there in nine figures until it happened.
But the urge of Manohla, as it is for most critics, I find, is to ascribe some sort of intent on the part of "The Industry." This, I disagree with… no matter how vacuous, silly, vain, arrogant, misogynistic, and foolish execs can be.
"Hollywood" is driven, before anything, by trends. It is one of the troubles of Hollywood, as there is this 18 month to 3 year lag in bringing studio films to market and trend chasing can be absolutely deadly. But still, they do it over and over and over again.
The only $100 million movie defined by a female lead last summer was Hairspray… and one could argue that the female lead was a man in a dress. (I would argue that Nikki Blonsky was the lead, but Travolta was very effective bait. In any case…)
The same reality was there in Pre-Prada 2005, when only Mr. & Mrs. Smith – arguably a two-headed phenom – was the only $100 million summer movie with a female lead.
Of the 28 films last year that grossed $100 million domestic, a total of 3 had female leads.
In 2006, there were three $100 million female-led grossers – the three lowest grossers on that list – one was Dreamgirls, a very specific kind of ensemble with little star-launching power, one was The Break-Up, starring the real Mrs. Pitt with the Wedding Crashers-hot Vince Vaughn, and Prada.
In 2005, there were only 4 movies with female leads with $100 million domestic… and all 4 had the women as co-stars with dominant male performances (Johnny Cash in Walk The Line, Jim Carrey in Fun With Dick & Jane, Pitt as Mr to Jolie’s Mrs Smith, and King Kong dominating Ms. Watts).
That is the trend line.
Continue reading "Is Hollywood Stepford Or Just Doing Business?"
Posted by poland at 06:55 PM | Comments (0)
April 01, 2008
The End of An Era: Episode One - The Critics
David Ansen joins the parade of film critics heading out the Traditional Media door at 62. He will, as Time's Corliss and Schickel, remain in the game. But unlike some outlets, Newsweek will surely establish a new critic, likely from their familiar gene pool.
I'd be shocked if the answer they come up with is not someone like Dave Karger from EW, Rebecca Keegan from Time, their own Ramin Setoodeh or some other young, New York media savvy, non-critic who has been around the industry for years.
The whole series of anti-criticism events demands a look at the bigger picture. I was asked last week about whether I thought all of these firings (with plenty more to come) really hurt independent film. And the answer is more complex than I would like it to be. Let me start with the punch line and then go back to the detail work ...
The weight of responsibility is now on exhibitors who want to be in the Indie business - and not just the Dependent business, which is rarely "indie" in any real way these days - and the distributors and the publicists to find the new dynamic to get audiences to show up at "art house" movies. The lack of as large a poll of critics to use as promotion to sell these films is a small issue compared to finding the screens around America to show these movies on and the uphill fight against scores of millions of dollars spent to sell "bigger" movies every weekend of the year.
Moreover, the studios have unthinkingly (with a few exceptions) conspired to turn even the critics who are keeping their jobs into worthless players. On the one side, you have a total whore like Peter Travers - when his name or that Rolling Stone logo on top of an ad now assures that a movie is suspect ... which is a shame for the good movies he is quoted for - who has become about as valuable as David Manning because no one reads his full reviews and he is so shameless about quoting that no one wants to do so. Doesn't it occur to studio ad departments that the only people who care about critics' reviews are the same people who know that Travers and Roeper are not remotely reliable? (Roeper is not a quote whore ... nor is his taste often horrible ... but he adds little in terms of ideas to the mix and is still referred to as "that guy" in most conversations I wander into with people.)
It is, obviously, arguable that studios are not responsible for promoting new critical talent. But at the same time, if they want critics as a truly valuable marketing tool, they need to make real choices about seeding the next generation. However, the mind set remains, "quote from the biggest, most legitimate possible media outlet, regardless of who the critic is."
When is the last time you saw a quote from The Baltimore Sun's Michael Sragow? Well, it was likely either in The Baltimore Sun or in a national ad for a movie that got weak quotes from a dozen other outlets before they even turned to the list that Sragow was on. And since Sragow - as an example here - doesn't write to be quoted, they would probably be adjusting his quote to make it hotter even in that situation, finding it easier to use a quote whore from the junket circuit who gave some mouth-breathing year's best kind of praise.
The flip side is The Indies, whose system of releasing films relies heavily on New York, then Los Angeles, then Chicago, and then on to another dozen markets, and then beyond, if things go well. But Indie advertisers still have the mindset of majors ... they want the biggest media outlets for quotes.
Continue reading "The End of An Era: Episode One - The Critics"
Posted by poland at 07:07 PM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2008
The SAG Missive Crisis
I was not in favor of WGA going out on strike when it did. I felt it was premature and poorly timed. Nothing about the settlement has changed my perspective on that. I feel that the AMPTP gave WGA almost exactly what they were always willing to give up. And WGA, by striking, gave AMPTP an extra gift that they may not have had to give AMPTP… force majeur and an excuse for in-house “layoffs.”
Truth is, we will never know for sure whether the strike was necessary. The contract WGA got, and DGA before them, is fine. It was not a great step forward… but it was not a step backwards either. The elephant in the room remains the $100 million-plus a year in DVD residuals in the life of this contract that came off the table and more than paid for any concession that AMPTP made, at least in the life of this contract. And the house cleaning opportunity made this 100 day strike a likely money maker for most AMPTP members.
That said… the growing wave of pre-contract civil war at SAG is making the WGA guys look like a bunch of unmitigated geniuses.
There are three fronts in the war.
1. We Don’t Want Another Strike This Year
2. SAG vs AFTRA
3. Qualified Voting
The biggest problem facing SAG leadership right now is trying to separate the three issues… a problem made harder by questions of who might be lurking behind some of the maneuvers. But first, a brief primer on the three fronts.
1. We Don’t Want Another Strike This Year
This is where I am willing, at least until proven otherwise, to give Clooney, DeNiro, Hanks, and Streep the benefit of the doubt in this situation. They took out this ad in Variety:
The does not speak to any of the major issues facing the Guild, internally or as a part of the AMPTP negotiation. It simply asks that there be forward motion.
One of the problems, again, with this situation is that the Guild’s internal issues – which may be much more dangerous than the AMPTP – have the most political members of the Guild wanting to open those issues to debate in the same period as the AMPTP contract is being negotiated. Why? Because that is the time when membership is most likely be willing to listen to the debate over these issues.
Having had the chance to speak to Clooney about the WGA strike in November, he was pretty confident that the town would be shut down until the end of summer. That is not the case. And I am completely willing to believe that he simply wanted to take a position that the tone that precipitated the WGA strike should not overtake SAG.
However, there are a few problems with this ad.
Continue reading "The SAG Missive Crisis"
Posted by poland at 06:44 PM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2008
Keep Your @(&$*ing Chocolate Out Of My Mutha@&(#&(ing Peanut Butter!
I just keep wrestling with this ...
How do Traditional Media and New Media match up? Just what in God's name is going on in the battle? Is anyone winning?
Every once in a while, I have an epiphany. And this is the one this month ...
Traditional Media is already well into its unfortunate morphing into New Media and, in the process, is failing both its traditions and its future.
I'm not saying that many on TM will not come out of the tailspin and find endless innovative ways of using the prestige of the past to dominate the future. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have already been leading the way in that regard. But right now, it's pretty iffy.
The circumstance that inspired this bubble to burst in my mind was reading, ongoingly, Brookes Barnes' attempts to cover the film industry and, by unavoidable extension, the television industry in the New York Times. Clearly the guy is bright and capable of doing what Traditional Media has always done, none better than the NYT. He gathers facts from strong sources, stronger than almost anyone because of the cachet of the NYT.
But Barnes is the first reporter on the movie beat to really start in the era of the blog. For Sharon Waxman and Laura Holson, unfortunately tasked with the melding of forms, they were way over their heads and it was truly a disaster. Both came onto the beat as solid reporters. But in the desperation to find footing against New Media, they jointly screwed up a majority of their stories, either by overreaching, underreaching, or sheer arrogance. All that said, that's in the past now.
Barnes came to the table as a fresh, younger face, presumably more in touch with how things in New Media worked and thus, offering a hope for a better transition. But sure enough, his coverage has gotten worse and worse and worse as he thinks he knows more and more and more.
This is not a syndrome unfamiliar in the entertainment media. But here is where I see a shift ... in the New York Times, your opinion as a reporter could shape a story, but your opinion remained subtext. It didn't really matter whether you were right or wrong because the facts led every story. Nowadays, inspired in all the wrong ways by the New Media boom, stories are led by and headlined by a lot more opinion.
Now ... that could be interesting too.
Continue reading "Keep Your @(&$*ing Chocolate Out Of My Mutha@&(#&(ing Peanut Butter!"
Posted by poland at 07:49 PM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2008
The Races - Presiential & Oscar
There is a tendency towards self-loathing in our industry, whether entertainment journalism or the various areas of the film business. After all, they are only movies ... right?
But the basic notions of human behavior apply to all endeavors, whether they seem more or less trivial. Rich oil men can be as self-absorbed and disappointed with the world as movie stars. The publicists at the White House have pretty much the same job to do as the personal and studio corporate publicists, albeit with very different stakes. And the wide range of coverage in the movie world, from gossip to hard news, is reflected in the Washington Press Corps, who deal with personality as often as policy these days.
And so, reading more coverage of the last few weeks of electioneering and the internal arguments in the Clinton and Obama campaigns, I also recognize the desperation on the part of journalists to put a bow on it ASAP. Things are redefined week by week, yet every week, there is a search for "The Answer."
What it really reminded me of, in my bi-focalled myopia of these last few months, was how the Oscar season presents itself.
Continue reading "The Races - Presiential & Oscar"
Posted by poland at 09:46 PM | Comments (0)