And So It Begins
Once August is here the summer is basically over. Any marketer will tell you August isn't the summer -- it's "August." And that means contending with the likes of Must Love Dogs, Red Eye, The Dukes of Hazzard, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Four Brothers, Pretty Persuasion and The 40 Year-Old Virgin already.
And this means that out of lethargy or some kind of psychological avoidance pattern people like myself are shifting into a September frame of mind (Toronto Film Festival!), which will quickly feed into October and the dawning of Oscar season. And none too soon.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:46 PM on Friday, July 29, 2005
Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello have been cast in Oliver Stone's 9/11 flick as the wives of the two Port Authority guys, Sgt. John McLoughlin and Officer William J. Jimeno, who were the last to be pulled from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena (last in
Million Dollar Baby) are playing McLouglin and Jimeno, respectively. I know this sounds cold, but I still don't get what the big human-interest angle is in this thing. Being the last guy to be pulled out of the rubble on that horrible day is more dramatic or emotionally meaningful than, say,...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:49 AM on Friday, July 29, 2005
Chris Columbus's
Rent (Columbia, 11.11) is already being dismissed as damaged goods. In a recent Oscar prediction chart David Poland asks, "How can something less than a decade old feel so passe already?" (Uhhm, because it deals with one or two characters dying from AIDS and because medical breakthroughs since the mid '90s have made AIDS a survivable affliction?) Plus in a recent
Entertainment Weekly Oscar forecast piece, Dave Karger warned than
Rent might not get awards traction if it winds up feeling like a "dated" stage show. Now, maybe
Rent works and maybe it doesn't, but the early dissing...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:08 PM on Thursday, July 28, 2005
So the reason the '06 Oscar schedule is a week later than last year's -- the Oscar show is happening on 3.5.06 rather than late February -- is because the Academy didn't want to compete with the closing ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics, which is set for 2.26? Does anyone apart from the families of the Olympic athletes really care that much about a closing ceremony? I really don't get this.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:14 AM on Thursday, July 28, 2005
I listed my Aristocrats favorites in Wednesday's lead piece -- Gilbert Gottfried, Kevin Pollak-as-Walken, Martin Mull-kiki, and the South Park telling. But I just realized I totally forgot to mention the bit when Andy Dick explains the meaning of "rusty trombone." I never knew what it meant before -- now I can't think about it without smirking. This film is truly diseased.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:52 AM on Thursday, July 28, 2005
Some people have been writing and tell me that the news ticker, which just went up last Friday, has been gumming up and/or freezing their computers. This is because the original program driving the ticker was slow and clunky and from Romania. We've just installed a new all-American version that may be easier and smoother to contend with....I hope. We're also looking around for ways to rewrite this news-ticker program with Flash, which may be even easier for everyone to process. Anyone out there know about writing Flash programs who'd be willing to help out?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:45 AM on Thursday, July 28, 2005
Listen to these
sound clips from
The Aristocrats (ThinkFilm, 7.29 limited)...a nice taste. No, that's putting it wrong. The word "taste" is distasteful given the repeated mentions of...forget it, I won't go there. But listen to the Gilbert Gottfried and Kevin Pollak clips.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:11 AM on Thursday, July 28, 2005
Gilbert Stood Tall
There are two things you need to know about Penn Gillette and Paul Provenza's The Aristocrats (ThinkFilm, 7.29 limited). One, it's quite funny but not in the usual way -- it makes you laugh and also say at the same time, "Am I really laughing at this?" And two, you need to see it not just for the humor, but for the journey it takes you on.
There's a quote made famous by the late Michael O'Donoghue that says "making people laugh is the lowest form of humor." This is one of the few films I've seen that...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:33 AM on Wednesday, July 27, 2005
There's a movie -- a Showtime or an HBO movie, I'm thinking -- in the story of Silvia Johnson, an indiscreet Colorado woman of 40 who just pled guilty to various charges for having schtupped a bunch of local teenage boys. A
news story says she threw a series of weekly parties between October '03 and October '04 in which she gave drugs and alcohol to eight of the boys and had sex with five of them. Enabling young guys to get high is stupid and irresponsible for any adult, but what's wrong with a little sexual healing? If only I'd known...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:23 AM on Tuesday, July 26, 2005
It's 97 blazing degrees on the streets of Manhattan today. We might as well be in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It's so hot you can break an egg and spill it on the sidewalk and it would sizzle, I swear. The air on some of the subway platforms feels like something out of a blast furnace. At least it's better than last week's climate, which was muggy like a rain forest's. There was a soppy thickness to the air...you needed a machete to cut through it.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:23 AM on Tuesday, July 26, 2005
The just-up
trailer for Rob Reiner's
Rumor Has it (Warner Bros., 12.9) looks like a typically conservative big-studio soother. It feels smart (i.e., alert), inviting, easy-going. The content, it suggests, will be that of a politely randy sex-and relationships comedy. And I have to admit it looks like the film will be fairly funny in the usual-usual sense....maybe.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:11 AM on Tuesday, July 26, 2005
One of the main reasons big-studio movies always feel appealing is because of the way they've been shot, or, more precisely, the way they've been lighted. The dp for
Rumor Has It is Peter Deming (
The Jacket,
I Heart Huckabees), and he has totally followed the standard drill by making all the actors in this trailer (Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Costner, Mark Ruffalo, Shirley MacLaine, etc.) look movie-star exquisite. Perfectly dressed, just the right hint of a golden-amber glow on their skin, every hair follicle arranged
just so, etc. Nobody ever talks about this, but the superficially sensual composition in these films is why...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:52 AM on Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Slamdance co-founder Dan Mirvish, a good guy and the director of the indie musical
Open House, "recently" fell and broke his leg and busted his shoulder, according to a
story on Film Threat. Does "recently" mean he had the accident a week ago...in early July...what? Sorry Dan's going through this -- I don't like to hear about anyone wincing in pain. There are addresses in the Film Threat story for sending Mirvish a get-well note or a can of sliced pineapples or whatever.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:33 PM on Monday, July 25, 2005
The Hollywood Elsewhere news ticker went "live" as of roughly 4:30 pm today, and is now up and running! Congratulations and deepest thanks to the great
Jim Stanley for hanging in there and making it work the way it was always supposed to. Thanks also to the creator of the
software, a guy from Romania named
Adamus Capuano. The speed of the copy is slightly faster on Internet Explorer than on Firefox (which I abruptly switched to last night) or Netscape, and the copy prematurely stops feeding on these two browsers as well as Safari, but we'll be refining things and...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:27 PM on Monday, July 25, 2005
Sorry to jump into this so late, but
The Island's lousy opening weekend wasn't a
"disaster" ($12.1 million at theatres...a pathetic $3876 per site) as much as totally pre-ordained. It was never really alive and in the game, and everyone knew this all along. Tracking figures were never very good, and once the word got around after the 7.13 nationwide sneak that it was more or less another
THX 1138 or
Logan's Run...forget it. Everything was tried, loads of TV ad money was spent, and the dogs just didn't want to eat the dog food.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:28 PM on Monday, July 25, 2005
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's second-weekend take was $27.5 million, a 51% dip from its opening weekend total. That means more than a few who've seen it came out of the theatre in a moderately unhappy frame of mind. The second-weekend total of Wedding Crashers, however, was down a mere 24% for a fresh haul of $25.7 million...a lot higher than I predicted on Friday. Happening!
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:01 PM on Sunday, July 24, 2005
What's the rumble about
Must Love Dogs, the John Cusack-Diane Lane romance that snuck last night?
Variety's Justin Chang praised Cusack's performance but called the film "middling." His lead graph begins, "To properly appreciate
Must Love Dogs, one must first love John Cusack...thesp's maverick turn steals the show." James Watson, non-pro from Tallahassee, wrote in this afternoon and said pic "wasn't half bad. The theatre sold out with mostly 30 to 40 year-old women in the audience, and it played extremely well with them. I found it mildly diverting, although it did have a few laugh-out-loud moments. Lane and Cusack have reasonably good...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:53 AM on Sunday, July 24, 2005
Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott...together again? That's what I hear, but that's all I've heard.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:43 AM on Sunday, July 24, 2005
You've got to keep on your toes if you're doing an online anything, and especially a gossip column. Take
Radar's "Paris Review", which is written by Julie Bloom and Derek De Koff. In Friday's 7.22 posting they ran a
multiple-choice quiz that led with a question about Paris Latsis' obsession with fiance Paris Hilton, and which included a photo of the couple calling them "the future Mr. and Mrs. Latsis." Very soon afterwards the
Star's website ran a
story saying the wedding's off and Paris has flown home from Greece, etc. I don't know if the
Star has it...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:07 AM on Sunday, July 24, 2005
So the Hollywood Elsewhere team is trying to install a travelling news-ticker thing at the very top of the column, but we're having trouble with a software that looked very cool at first but has since developed some problems. Are there any software designers out there with a solid reliable news-ticker software that can handle RSS feeds from different sites, maintain the same look and speed on different browsers, and generally be steady and consistent all the way around the block? If you can fill the bill, I'll not only buy it from you -- I'll tell everyone else how good it is...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:26 AM on Sunday, July 24, 2005
Variety's Michael Fleming is
reporting that the "official" title of Steven Spielberg's currently-rolling feature about Israel's revenge on the Palestinians behind the 1972 Munich killing of Israeli athletes is
Munich...or at least that the cover page of Tony Kushner's script "starts" with this word. Fleming repeats the general concern about the film leaning too heavily on a book about the Israeli operation called "Vengeance," because the book's veracity "has been widely questioned." Look...I figured this whole thing out in a
piece than ran on March 9th. Read it over and tell me if it doesn't make sense. The bottom...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:50 AM on Sunday, July 24, 2005
In Sunday's
N.Y. Daily News, Elizabeth Weitzman
asks if Ben McKenzie, whom she calls
The O.C.'s "resident hunk," is about to make his mark in the forthcoming
Junebug (Sony Classics, 8.5). I've seen
Junebug and yes, McKenzie's performance shows "he can do more than brood beautifully," as Weitzman puts it -- it shows he's extremely convincing at playing a pathetic jerk.
Junebug is a nicely handled family relationship drama, but McKenzie's "Johnny" character is an uneducated, emotionally immature blue-collar dork who treats his wife with callous disregard. (The wife, a very pregnant woman named Ashley, who's a bit too angelic and...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:13 AM on Sunday, July 24, 2005
So there's Page Six's
account of the circumstances surrounding the canning of publicist Jasmine Madatian at Paramount Pictures, and there's
David Poland's...the latter having been posted Saturday night after Poland looked into it (he was the first to report Madatian's sacking) and was told the Page Six version was wrong. I haven't called around about this myself, but I'm presuming Poland probably has it right. His version is a lot more specific and I know he's got good sources on the lot.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:18 AM on Sunday, July 24, 2005
It's funny how this always seems to play out, but there's always been a regional/geographical tendency when it comes to print and online journos reporting stories about Hollywood. London journos are the toughest (the tabs can be merciless and sometimes insane, but London's serious critics, essayists and documentary filmmakers have frequently been the most candid and piercing and on-target). New York journos are almost as tough and lacerating as the Londoners but somewhat less so because their editors sometimes "play the game," meaning there's a now-and-then, depending-on-the-shot tendency to sand down the edges and perhaps be a tad more circumspect. And L.A. journos...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:57 AM on Sunday, July 24, 2005
Obliquely racist labelling of
Hustle & Flow is an irritant and a real problem. The always thoughtful and frequently fair-minded David Poland
says the Paramount Classics film "still hasn't made a strong move to crossing outside of being an 'urban' success" and that "the international market for black dramas is not strong." The universal humanist chord struck by
Hustle & Flow is so obvious and pervasive that calling it an urban black film is like saying Melissa Etheridge is first and foremost a blue-state lesbian singer, Nelson Mandella is first and foremost a black politician and Jesus of Nazareth was first and...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:26 PM on Saturday, July 23, 2005
No joy in Mudville over
Friday's figures. I was hoping
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would suffer a heavy drop this weekend (for his own good, Tim Burton needs to be bitch-slapped but good), but it took in $9 million on Friday and will probably end up with $25 million or so for the weekend. There's really no accounting for taste, especially when it comes to the family trade.
Wedding Crashers is holding quite nicely, on track to earn a bit more than $20 million for the weekend.
Hustle & Flow took in $2.7 million on Friday -- you do the math...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:59 AM on Saturday, July 23, 2005
Reporting for the
New York Times, David Carr is the latest journalist to visit the St. Paul, Minnesota, set of Robert Altman's
Prairie Home Companion. He differs, however, with reports about Paul Thomas Anderson acting as some kind of
de facto co-director. [See below] Referring to Anderson as "a thin young man [who] kept popping up on Mr. Altman's shoulder during shooting recently," Carr says Anderson "is ostensibly on the set for insurance purposes; Mr. Altman is 80, so a backup director is part of the package." He also quotes Anderson as saying, "Whatever chef is going to take credit for it,...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:37 AM on Saturday, July 23, 2005
To many, Carr explains later in the same
New York Times piece,
A Prairie Home Companion" is "a kind of secular religion." Robert Altman, the film's director, offers the following assessment: "Garrison [Keillor]'s audience is like the Mel Gibson Jesus audience. This movie is going to play for two weeks in places like Chicken Switch, Arizona, because the program has such strong rural appeal. The cast and myself will have our own audience to draw on. I think given that we have Meryl Streep and Lindsay Lohan, a lot of different people will be curious to see what this movie is about."...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:34 AM on Saturday, July 23, 2005
I'm looking to extend my stay in New York until October or thereabouts, and am therefore looking for another swap arrangement (Manhattanite or Brooklynite takes my place, I take his/hers) starting around 8.25...but
Craig's List is going to sleep on me, so I thought I'd post it here. I also posted on this other Craig's List-type website for under-30s called
Tribe.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:14 AM on Saturday, July 23, 2005
Jim Sheridan's
Get Rich or Die Tryin', the true story of how 50 Cent got out of crime and into a successful rappin' career, is suddenly coming out November 11? Didn't it just finish shooting in Manhattan? Whatever. Here's the
trailer. The Paramount release costars 50 Cent, Joy Bryant, Viola Davis, Terrence Howard, Bill Duke and Rhyon Nicole Brown.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:54 PM on Friday, July 22, 2005
Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole is coming out on DVD through Paramount Home Video sometime in the fall, although the precise date is a little vague. DVD Newsletter's Doug Pratt passed along a date of September 9th, while Paramount's international DVD guy Martin Blythe says he's heard it's "been pushed back" from that date.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:49 PM on Friday, July 22, 2005
Still The Shit
I've written so much about Hustle & Flow I'm starting to bore myself, but this is the weekend and now's the time. I saw it with my son and a couple of his friends at the sneak last Saturday night, and I felt the same satisfied vibe from the people walking out...the same one I've been feeling since last January.
This movie sells ideas about life and creativity that may not be true, but people sure as hell want to believe them...I know that. We've all got pain in our hearts and poetry in our souls and it's never...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:39 PM on Friday, July 22, 2005
James Mangold's
Walk the Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18) is thought to be primarily a one-man show -- a Johnny Cash biopic with Joaquin Pheonix supposedly giving an ace performance as the famed country singer and...you know, delivering the same kind of panache that Jamie Foxx brought to his portrayal of Ray Charles in
Ray. What the film really is, I'm hearing, is more of double-header love story groove about the relationship between Cash and wife June Carter (Reese Witherspoon). I hear that Pheonix and Witherspoon tear it up equally, that Witherspoon gives as good as she gets...and they both do...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:05 PM on Friday, July 22, 2005
It's looking like Robert Altman's
A Prairie Home Companion, based on a script by Garrison Keillor about various eccentrics taking part in the final broadcast of Keillor's radio show, isn't entirely a Robert Altman film. A 7.20
report by
St.Paul Pioneer Press's Chris Hewitt suggests that the still-rolling production is some kind of collaboration between a somewhat weakened Altman and "ghost director" Paul Thomas Anderson. The director of
Magnolia and
Boogie Nights and a longtime Altman admirer and friend "has no official title, but he works mostly with Altman and the actors, and his director's chair is labeled 'Pinch Hitter,'"...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:25 PM on Friday, July 22, 2005
Here, in my humble judgment, is the fairest, most fully considered, best-written
review of Gus Van Sant's
Last Days that's turned up anywhere...except, maybe, for the thing I
wrote in Wednesday's column.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:50 AM on Friday, July 22, 2005
Inquisitive, bored-with-the-usual Manhattan filmgoers, take note:
The Century of the Self, a totally riveting BBC-produced documentary by Adam Curtis (
The Power of Nightmares), will begin a run at the Cinema Village on 8.12, and it
really must be seen. I've no qualms in calling it the most intriguing, audacious, and insightful study of publicity, mass psychology and Orwellian mind control ever put together. I'm going to re-run a May 2003 piece about it in next Wednesday's (7.27) column -- here's the
link for now. It's the third story down...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:33 PM on Thursday, July 21, 2005
In a 7.17 WIRED item [see below] I ran a list of the year's best films so far (the total came to 22), but I should have included one more: Jon Gunn, Brian Herzlinger and Brett Winn's
My Date With Drew (DEJ, 8.5), a spritzy, surprisingly spiritual doc about Herzlinger, a struggling schlub in a one-bedroom apartment when the film was shot, trying to somehow arrange a date with Drew Barrymore. I first saw it at the Vail Film Festival in April '04 and
wrote about it as follows: "This hand-held camcorder movie plays like a frothy distraction...at first. Then it...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:38 AM on Thursday, July 21, 2005
No question that Vanessa Grigoriadis'
excellent piece in the current
New York magazine about unbalanced, seemingly unhinged celebrity behavior ("Celebrity and Its Discontents: A Diagnosis") is going to sell a lot of copies and get talked about all over...especially due to that hilarious cover showing Tomkat in straightjackets. But somewhere in the piece, shouldn't Grigoriadis have acknowledged Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner's
Hollywood Interrupted, which was the first published diatribe about the trend of celebrities melting down and wacking out? Published in the spring of '04, the book was lively and punchy, but also taken to task here and there...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:41 AM on Thursday, July 21, 2005
Kelefa Sanneh has written a
dissection of Jessica Simpson's "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" video in a
New York Times piece ("These Musical Genres Are Made for Mashing"). The verdict is that this musical
Dukes of Hazzard promo is an "odd" collision of musical genres and performers with country fiddles "sawing away over that electronic beat [and a] honky-tonk chorus giving way to a rap section that evokes Gwen Stefani." Sanneh compares Simpson's cut to the
Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazelwood hit single from '65 or thereabouts, and notes that Simpson's "has new verses that turn a scorned woman's vow into...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:33 AM on Thursday, July 21, 2005
Serious DVD fanatics with the ability to write concisely and with style should drop a line to HE's Discland editor Jonathan Doyle at jd@storefrontdemme.com. My apologies to Jon for not getting this announcement up sooner.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:16 PM on Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Kurt's Eclipse
It took me a while, but I've finally come to see that Gus Van Sant's Last Days (Picturehouse, 7.22) is some kind of great film, and maybe even a masterpiece.
About five weeks before I first saw Last Days at the Cannes Film Festival, I showed Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse (The Eclipse), a stylishly profound piece about alienation and spiritual drainage among the aspiring classes in 1962 Rome, to some UCLA students in a class I was teaching.
Michael Pitt (l.) as the Kurt Cobain-like Blake, with Kim Gordon (wife-partner of Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore) in...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:12 PM on Wednesday, July 20, 2005
It's strange that an eagle-eyed
New York Times writer like Caryn James would write a
piece about how it's totally common these days for journalists to be depicted as slimeballs in movies these days (
Cronicas,
Paparazzi,
Cinderella Man). And note that the last time journalists were shown as heroic or even respectable was nearly 30 years ago in
All The President's Men. And yet fail to mention that a fairly major film called
Good Night. And, Good Luck (Warner Bros.), due in November, will tell a stirring story of a very noble and moralistic journalist by the name of Edward R. Murrow...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:11 PM on Monday, July 18, 2005
Johnny Depp is saying he didn't base his Willy Wonka character on Michael Jackson. "It never entered my mind," Depp allegedly told an interviewer. "Michael Jackson loves children but Willy Wonka doesn't." The actual inspirations, he said, were kiddie TV hosts Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Rogers and Uncle Al. To which I say, trust the art but never the artist.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:00 PM on Monday, July 18, 2005
Check out this
Hustle & Flow pay-attention
promo thing. Not a trailer -- it just lays out what Craig Brewer's film (Paramount Classics, 7.22) is from an inward thematic perspective. Sums it up, gets it all. But Anthony Anderson, man...cat's gotta get on that treadmill and cut down on whatever he's eatin' 'cause there's a surplus.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:39 PM on Monday, July 18, 2005
Here's Lewis Beale's
assessment in today's issue of
Newsday about the summer slump. He agrees that admissions have been down since '02 (how can he not agree to a fact?) and acknowledges that exhibitors are getting hurt the most, but he also explains how moneybags Hollywood is doing fine. I'm quoted saying the following: "The issue isn't that movie attendance is soft this summer. The issue is that the fundamental idea of 'going out to the movies' is losing its hold on the moviegoing public. Seeing movies in theaters is being slowly depopularized and retired by different groups for different reasons."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:56 AM on Monday, July 18, 2005
In the 7.18
New York Times, reporter Sharon Waxman has an
interesting piece about Hollywood trying to tailor its movie content and adapt selling techniques to reach the thriving Christian demo -- i.e., the audience primarily responsibly for turning
The Passion of the Christ into a gargantuan hit last year. In paragraph #2, she quotes
Mr. and Mrs. Smith director Doug Liman using the term "hip, young cool Christians." Whoa...stop right there. It's all well and good for Hollywood to try and make money any way it can, but can there be such a thing as Christians who are truly "hip and...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:06 AM on Monday, July 18, 2005
Warner Bros. is "fine" with the $55 million earned by
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, David Poland
wrote today on The Hot Blog, but "they are probably a little put off by a $20 million take on a Friday and not getting to triple that with a family movie." A "little" put off? Then Poland rhetorically inquires, "Will
Charlie get a whole new wave of kids who spend the [coming] week talking about the film and from parents of younger kids who hear that the darkness has a strong positive message?" What...he's serious?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:00 PM on Sunday, July 17, 2005
Okay, I was a bit off. Charlie and the Choclate Factory didn't make $60 million this weekend -- it only hit $55.4 million. Whoa, wait a minute...isn't an 8% Friday-to-Saturday business falloff a tad unusual for a kid-friendly film? I hear thunder clouds. I see Charlie stepping into...good God, quicksand! Oh, and Wedding Crashers hit $32.2 million...excellent start.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:16 PM on Sunday, July 17, 2005
If anyone knows how to assemble a professional-looking flash ad (taking already created elements within four frames and making them appear in sequence, ad infinitum), please get in touch. I don't know jack about any of this...thanks.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:59 AM on Sunday, July 17, 2005
Words from the
Flick Filosopher about Johnny Depp, Michael Jackson and
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: "Is Tim Burton going soft in the sentiment lobe? How did a cautionary tale about the bad things that happen to obnoxious little kids turn into a celebration of [tyke obnoxiousness]? How did a celebration of the exuberant spirit of a conscious nonconformity turn into a cautionary tale about the psychosis of reclusive oddballism? Depp's Wonka, with his pale, pasty face and neurotic standoffishness, scarily invokes the Michael Jackson example of social deviance: this is our new idea of unconventionality, as debased and corrupt and possibly...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:35 AM on Sunday, July 17, 2005
When I first saw the photo of former New York cop
Lou Eppolito and his partner after their arrest for alleged involvement in mob hits, I knew I'd seen him before. It hit me this morning...it was that five-second quickie cameo in which Eppolito played "Fat Andy" in
Goodfellas. Remember that long elaborate steadicam shot in which the camera, assuming Ray Liotta's travelling POV, goes from one wiseguy to the next inside that bamboo-decorated mob hangout? Eppolito is one of the patrons who waves slightly at Liotta and says, in a relaxed and unforced way, "What's up, guy?" Eppolito has played
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:47 AM on Sunday, July 17, 2005
Craig Modderno's
New York Times story points out that
Chris Mulkey is this year's Jude Law -- '05's most ubiquitous actor who will have "as many as" eight films coming out this year. (I've seen one so far --
Mysterious Skin -- and have't even heard of the other seven.) Nice little IMDB story, fine...even if Modderno fails to mention the one performance that Mulkey will almost certainly be remembered for a hundred or two hundred years from now, the one role that should and in all likelihood will be chiselled into his tombstone: Jack DeVries, the alien-inhabited, roadblock-defying driver of...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:21 AM on Sunday, July 17, 2005
People keep telling me at parties that "nothing all that good has opened so far this year." They're wrong, they're lazy and they need to wake up. Some of the following picks are about to open or have only shown at festivals, okay, but enough with the talk about this being a dry year. There's been (or will be soon) Gus Van Sant's
Last Days, Jacques Audiard's
The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Jim Jarmusch's
Broken Flowers, David Cronenberg's
A History of Violence, the first two-thirds of
Wedding Crashers, Fernando Meirelles'
The Constant Gardener, Paul Haggis's
Crash, Ridley Scott's entirely decent
Kingdom of...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:28 AM on Sunday, July 17, 2005
The Friday figures suggest Charlie and the Chocolate Factory will end up with someting like $60 million for the weekend...probably. And The Wedding Crashers will come across the Sunday night finish line with $28 to $30 million...fine. Any bets about which film is going to experience the heavier dropoff next weekend? Or which will have the longer legs?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:00 PM on Saturday, July 16, 2005
In John Horn's July 17th
L.A. Times piece about Michael Bay's various struggles in the making and marketing of
The Island (DreamWorks, 7.22), he describes an early meeting between Bay and the film's producers, Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, in which Bay "didn't want to discuss cinematography [or] outline stunts...he wanted to argue plot." And then Parkes says, "I was expecting Michael to start talking about shots and cranes and camera rigs, but he was focused on the story and its moral questions. That really surprised me." In other words, Parkes didn't expect Bay to have a single exploratory thought in his...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:34 PM on Saturday, July 16, 2005
Never Got `Em
The Dukes of Hazzard (Warner Bros., 8.5), a '70s retro redneck fast-car thrillbillie movie that looks like a lotta fun...the kind of fun that comes from sticking needles in your eyes...will be upon us three weeks from today.
I think it's entirely fair to assume the worst with films of this type. I mean, look at the trailer already. Get out the chewing tobacco and clothes pins.
Johnny Knoxville, Jessica Simpson, Sean William Scott in
The Dukes of Hazzard.
Does anyone see any indications that this might be Starsky...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:46 PM on Friday, July 15, 2005
In today's
Wall Street Journal, John Lippman
reports that about three and a half weeks ago Warner Bros. agreed to pay $17.5 million to a group of people "who held rights related" to the
Dukes of Hazzard TV series. The payout involved a collossal mistake: Warner Bros. and the producers of the upcoming
Dukes of Hazzard feature (opening August 5th) never secured the movie rights. The
Hazzard TV series itself "was based on a 1975 United Artists film called
Moonrunners," Lippman recounts. "Producer Bob Clark acquired [the
Moonrunners] script by Gy Waldron, which Waldron also directed. In 1978, Warner Bros. acquired the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:29 AM on Friday, July 15, 2005
Saw
The Aristocrats (ThinkFilm, 7.29) for the second time last night (the first viewing was at Sundance), and it was no less fascinating, subversive or howlingly funny. Take your mother to see this film! Here's a
link to my five month old "Wallow In It" Sundance review (scroll down a ways) and here's the
trailer. My favorite highlights, in this order, are (a) Kevin Pollak doing Chris Walken telling the Aristocrats joke ("It's...
crazy!"); (b) Gilbert Gottfried doing the joke just after 9.11 at a Manhattan Friar's Club roast (also a bit in which Gottfried explains why a...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:24 AM on Friday, July 15, 2005
I'm looking for readers to send in some tight 75 to 100-word reactions to Hustle & Flow, which is sneaking tomorrow night (Saturday, 7.16) in, I'm guessing, mostly urban areas. I'm wondering how "ethnic" everyone thinks this film actually is. I think Hustle & Flow is basically a feel-good formula thing that anyone can get into...it's about finding your groove, spiritual discovery, emotional openings and happy endings. And please share how it seems to play with whatever kind of audience (ethnicity, presumed income levels, etc.) you happen to see it with...thanks.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:03 AM on Friday, July 15, 2005
"As Jeremy Klein, a cad who crashes weddings for those available, single women, [Vince Vaughn] is a cad and a half. And he can motormouth like a machine gun, spraying men, women and children with manic, rat-a-tat outbursts of toxic insincerity. It's often dirty, yes. But it's also manic and inspired." -- Washington Post critic Desson Thomson on Vaughn's phenomenal performance in The Wedding Crashers.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:50 AM on Friday, July 15, 2005
DreamWork's
The Island still isn't tracking -- the hoped-for boost from last Saturday night's nationwide sneak simply didn't happen. Everything has been tried, loads of TV ad money has been spent trying to get it off the runway and it's just not taking. Awareness and interest is also on the low side for Rob Cohen's
Stealth (Columbia, 7.29), according to recent data...despite Jamie Foxx (a costar along with Josh Lucas) being front-and-center in the trailer. Opening tracking figures on Warner Bros.'
The Dukes of Hazzard showed a 72% general awareness, a 36% definite interest and 5% first-choice...which is pretty good for a movie...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:03 PM on Thursday, July 14, 2005
I'm repeating myself but I want to be clear that a source in Laura Kim's office at Warner Independent didn't tell me when I spoke to her on Wednesday that Douglas McGrath's Truman Capote biopic, which isn't being released until September '06, has been retitled Have You Heard? and is therefore no longer being called Every Word is True.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:31 AM on Thursday, July 14, 2005
Former
Dukes of Hazzard costar Ben Jones (a.k.a., "Crazy Cooter") can
tut-tut all he wants about the upcoming
Warner Bros. film version having too much sex and profanity and trashing the legacy of the TV series...nobody's listening. The first taste of tracking data on
The Dukes of Hazzard (8.5) will be available later today, but I can smell the wanna-see from here. For me, it's the latest Al Qeada recruitment film disguised as the Return of the Stupid Redneck Movie. Burt Reynolds starred in nearly all of these dumb-ass things (in fact, making too many of them is what killed his...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:19 AM on Thursday, July 14, 2005
All of those '70s Burt Reynolds redneck movies and their relations were shit, of course...and
of course no one remembers or would dare to think about remaking a certain Lamont Johnson flick that did it first and best and pretty much inspired the blue-collar, wild-ass, hot-babe-riding-shotgun, moonshine-in-the-trunk, outrunning-the-local-fuzz genre. I'm speaking of a quality film about a scrappy southern guy with an appetite for speed and souped-up cars -- a dude who makes a semblance of a living smuggling moonshine before becoming a famous stock-car racer -- called
The Last American Hero ('73). It starred Jeff Bridges, Valerie Perrine, Ned Beatty, Gary Busey...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:19 AM on Thursday, July 14, 2005
The inspiration for Lamont Johnson's
film was, of course, Tom Wolfe's legendary 1965
Esquire article about famed stockcar racer Junior Johnson ("The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson.
Yes!"). It's a great piece and the whole article is
right here. Please read it...it's fantastic. Articles like this one and films like
The Last American Hero make me momentarily forget about red-state attitudes and even inspire admiration for the vitality of working-class types and blue-collar culture. They make me briefly ashamed of having used terms like "redneck." It's not genuine Americana that I hate -- it's the degraded, stupid-ass, hee-haw stuff peddled...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:30 AM on Thursday, July 14, 2005
It's a good thing, of course, that AMC Theatres has decided not to show Thinkfilm's
The Aristocrats in Atlanta and Chicago, as
stories about this will up the want-to-see among people who otherwise might not have paid any attention. Everyone needs to see this thing. It's not what I would call hugely funny at first, but it gets funnier and skankier and more creative as it goes along, and gradually you just succumb. Not a movie that enobles the human experience, exactly, and yet it is that in a certain way...it's a celebration of particularity most perverse.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:52 AM on Thursday, July 14, 2005
Groaning with Charlie
I have a very strong if fragmented opinion of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That's because I saw only the opening 35 minutes last Thursday evening, so take these words with a grain of salt and read someone else for an in-depth review.
But I know what I know, darn it, and I've always been able to spot problematic movies in ten minutes or less (just like I can tell if a script is any good or not after reading the first ten pages), and for whatever this method or impression may be worth to readers, I despised this...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:22 PM on Wednesday, July 13, 2005
This is just an industry thing, but the other shoe finally dropped at Paramount today when it was announced that Rob Friedman is leaving his job as Paramount's COO and vice chairman "to pursue other interests," which basically means he's been shown the door. The reason, I'm told, is because Tom Freston, the Viacom president and COO who hired Brad Grey as Parammount's chairman and CEO and who basically calls the shots, has a "history" with Freidman from the era when he ran the Viacom-owned MTV Networks. "When Freston was running MTV and he was trying to get stuff done under Sherry Lansing,"...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:01 PM on Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Warner Home Video deserves a hearty thanks for making Arthur Penn's
Night Moves available and looking spiffy on DVD starting today. WHV made another excellent move last Tuesday (7.5) when they released a first-rate DVD of John Boorman's highly-respected noir
Point Blank. It's truly an excellent thing that these long-absent classics are finally out and gettable...even if I was told "sorry, we don't have it" seven times last weekend during a painstaking search to find and buy the
Point Blank DVD. (More about this in a piece running Wednesday, 7.13.)
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:36 AM on Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Let me get this straight: the perfectly dreadful
Fantastic Four, a film so awful it makes you briefly toy with the idea of never going to a movie again, made $56.1 million last weekend and because people just blindly paid to see to this piece of shit despite
overwhelming indications they were in for a bad time...this means the slump is over? The forces driving
The Big Fade are not going to turn on the fortunes of a single crappy movie, trust me. I'll say it again -- it's not the money, it's the
attendance. '05 theater admissions are down about 10.4%...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:21 AM on Tuesday, July 12, 2005
For the first time since this site launched last August, I'm posting two new hot links sections -- "Essentials" (around 50 of the usual-usuals) and "Eye-Openers" (striking, different, noteworthy...whatever) on the lower-right margin, below the fold. They'll be up in the early evening. I'm open to any suggestions from anyone about any new links I should be posting, etc.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:05 PM on Monday, July 11, 2005
Would anyone besides myself be pleasantly startled if Paramount Classics'
Hustle & Flow out-performs Michael Bay's
The Island (DreamWorks) and Richard Linklater's
The Bad News Bears when all three open the weekend after next? Not a higher national gross but a much higher per-screen average, I mean. I'm not saying the Bay or the Linklater film won't be #1 (either one could surge over the next eleven days), but the statistical
fact is that
The Island didn't get that much of a benefit out of last Saturday's nationwide sneak (60% general awarness, 25% definite interest and 2% first choice as of Sunday, 7.10)....
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:51 PM on Monday, July 11, 2005
No change in tracking for the coming weekend.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Warner Bros., 7.15), the first choice of 27% of likely moviegoers, will be the easy victor. And yet the numbers for
Wedding Crashers have risen (definite interest is 17%) since last week, and the prognosis is for an opening in the mid $20 million range. It's odd how many people have weighed in against this flawed but hugely funny film since...well, since I ran that qualified rave (first two thirds terrific, last third not-so-hot but it bounces back at the finish) last Friday. This thing is funny...what's everyone being so...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:35 PM on Monday, July 11, 2005
If something like
this had been in
March of the Penguins, soreheads like me wouldn't have disliked it so much. And I don't care if it was originally posted by
Movie City News columnist Ray Pride...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:01 PM on Sunday, July 10, 2005
You can tell from reading Zach Helm's script of
Stranger Than Fiction that the movie, being directed by Marc Forster, will probably be a good score for everyone involved, including star Will Ferrell, when Columbia releases it next year. And Ferrell will kick ass in
The Producers: The Movie Musical (Universal, 12.23) in the Franz Leibkind role -- i.e., the one played by Kenneth Mars in Mel Brooks' 1968 original. But it must be said right now that Ferrell is in trouble. Partly due to over-exposure (appearances in five films in '05 not counting the un-released
Winter Passing and
The Wendell Baker Story)....
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:26 PM on Sunday, July 10, 2005
Pithy observation
here from
New York Times critic Tony Scott in a piece about the differences in the way films are sold, absorbed and processed between the '70s and now. "The window between the theatrical and DVD release is now shorter than a successful first run used to be," he
writes. "Even the term 'first run' has a ring of almost vaudevillian antiquity. There is now a pre-release sprint that leaves audiences (and journalists and publicists) winded by opening day. Three weeks later, the picture is a fading memory. Here I am still going on about
War of the Worlds, which...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:14 PM on Sunday, July 10, 2005
Wedding Crashers costar Owen Wilson is asked by Hollywood Hitlist columnist Gregory Ellwood about his "Butterscotch Stallion" nickname in this
recently-posted interview on MSN. Owen's reply: "I love that. It has to be one of the most ridiculous, insane nicknames, but some of my friends have really picked up on it. I think they know it's kind of humiliating to me."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:07 PM on Sunday, July 10, 2005
Apologies for the Saturday screw-up, i.e., accidentially posting Jett's reaction to The Beat That My Heart Skipped in WIRED...stupid. I did it through a dial-up in connection from Connecticut and tried right away to remove it...obviously the effort failed.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:02 PM on Sunday, July 10, 2005
Here They Come...
That Vince Vaughn profile in the current Newsweek doesn't lie. His performance as a motor-mouthed, totally scheming hound in Wedding Crashers -- a very sharp, at times inspired comic romp -- is so hilarious at times that it feels off the earth.
I was saying to myself during last night's press screening, "This is astounding...the great dialogue just keeps blasting away and Vaughn isn't missing a beat."
Immaculate deception: Owen Wilson and Vince Vaugh in David Dobkin's
Wedding Crashers It's not just Vaughn, of course, but...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:50 AM on Friday, July 8, 2005
The reason Michael Bay's The Island (DreamWorks, 7.22) is sneaking nationwide this Saturday (7.9) is because it's not tracking very well, partly because Ewan MacGregor and Scarlett Johansson are "industry stars" who don't put butts in seats. I hear it's not quite the greatest film of the 21st Century, but it must be doing fairly well with Average-Joe audiences or they wouldn't sneak it to begin with.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:26 PM on Thursday, July 7, 2005
On the other end there's
Wedding Crashers (New Line, 7.15), a comedy that's tracking decently but not tremendously (i.e., it's more or less where
Monster-in-Law was a week before its release) and could probably use the exposure of a nationwide sneak....but it's not getting one. This despite the fact it's opening only eight days from now
and has been getting great word of mouth. I guess New Line is figuring they're going to get whipped next weekend by
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Warner Bros., 7.15) anyway, so why go nuts trying to be the #1 film when the word-of-mouth is going to...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:22 PM on Thursday, July 7, 2005
I'm presuming Ryan Phillipe got
cast in Cint Eastwood's
Flags of Our Fathers because he was exceptional in Paul Haggis's
Crash (as Matt Dillon's rookie-cop partner), and that particular attention was paid because Haggis wrote
Million Dollar Baby, etc. And I'm figuring Jesse Bradford was also brought aboard because of his performance in Chris Terrio's
Heights . I have to say I detected modest intelligence levels, at best, and a very low energy reading from Bradford's acting in that recent, relatively unsuccessful New York drama. Look deep into Bradford's dark eyes and there's nobody home....blanko.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:40 AM on Thursday, July 7, 2005
What's with the comma in George Clooney's Good Night and, Good Luck, the Edward R. Murrow vs. Joseph McCarthy drama that I've blurbed a couple of times? The comma after the "and" is there to suggest the pause that Murrow used before saying "good luck" on the air, but wouldn't an ellipses be better? And is it "Goodnight" or "Good Night"? Pic is a Warner Independent release, having been deemed too indie-ish and dialogue-driven for regular-ass Warner Bros. It's due in November (a friendly lady in Laura Kim's office just told me this) and you've gotta figure it'll play the Toronto Film Festival.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:24 AM on Thursday, July 7, 2005
Here's the
best rundown I've read about the story and the meaning of Craig Brewer's
Black Snake Moan. It's from Brewer himself in a long response to a question from Black Film correspondent Wilson Morales. The IMDB says the Paramount Classics film, due in '06 with Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci in the leads, is about "a white nymphomaniac" being "cured of her disorder by an older black bluesman." Like everyone else I had interpreted the title in sexual terms (remember that actor in
Full Metal Jacket exhibiting his appendage to a Vietnamese prostitute and calling it a specimen of "Alabama...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:06 AM on Thursday, July 7, 2005
Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way wants to produce a movie of Kurt Vonnegut's
Cat's Cradle...cool. I have had the image of an Ice-Nine catastrophe -- all of the world's oceans, rivers and great lakes suddenly freezing solid in a massive chain-reaction -- sitting in my head since reading Vonnegut's novel 30-something years ago. Claude Brodesser's
Variety story describes the plot as being about "a race to recover the world's most dangerous substance, Ice-Nine, a new form of ice that freezes at room temperature." Vonnegut's book explains that Ice-Nine, created by a character named Felix Hoenikker, is capable of creating a chain reaction that...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:43 AM on Thursday, July 7, 2005
Speaking of DiCaprio, what's happening with his intention to produce a film about (and perhaps play) LSD guru Dr. Timothy Leary? Work on a script was begun late last year by L.M. Kit Carson. I know because Kit told me, and because I urged Carson to research it by wading into a book by Jay Stevens called
Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, which is by far the most comprehensive and fascinating account of the '60s psychedelic movement I've ever read. I mentioned it to DiCaprio when I saw him at a party last February in Santa Barbara, and was...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:29 AM on Thursday, July 7, 2005
Don't believe that
David Poland clique saying there's no box-office slump. There
is a slump, there
is a slump...the average gross per movie has been on a decline since '03 and average attendance per film has been dropping steadily since '01. It's the
attendance, stupid -- the actual number of people showing up at theatres is dropping year after year.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:06 AM on Thursday, July 7, 2005
Plexes should extend that satisfaction-or-your-money-back offer for all films, all the time...except for big crowd-pleasers like
Fantastic Four,
Bewitched, etc. Nobody will lose any money (it's been
reported that only a relative handful have asked AMC and Cinemark theatre staffers for their money back after seeing
Cinderella Man) and it might goose things up a bit.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:16 AM on Thursday, July 7, 2005
Another way of boosting theatre biz would be to adopt my idea of selling time-passes to plexes, in which the patron buys a ticket to a particular film but also, for an extra two or three bucks, buys a pass permitting him/her to wander around from theatre to theatre free and clear in order to sample the various attractions or simply see another film. I do this all the time under the ushers' noses. If I don't like something, I slip out and try some other film...or I see pieces of two or three films, just to get an idea of how they...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:07 AM on Thursday, July 7, 2005
End of Something
There's more than a sense of unease in theatres across the land this summer. It's something like mild panic, and is based upon fears that the "slump" affecting ticket sales this summer isn't a slump but something more fundamental.
I'm not saying anything new here, but stories about the months-long slump keep coming and the authors keep missing the overall picture. The issue isn't that movie attendance is "soft" this summer. The issue is that the fundamental idea of going out to the movies is losing its hold on the film-going populace. And I may be way behind the curve...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:43 PM on Wednesday, July 6, 2005
Forget the talk that Cruise's cultish orgasms of late have sabotaged War of the Worlds. The real reason it's underperforming is the putrid word of mouth. I've had no less than SIX friends call me immediately after seeing it, pissed at the typical Spielberg tacked-on ending. And when I say pissed, I mean incensed. His hackneyed amending of A.I. was legendarily bad, and the buzz is that this is on par with that. Kubrick is nodding vigorously in his grave.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:51 PM on Wednesday, July 6, 2005
Nine years after I saw
Swingers and right after wrote a
Mr. Showbiz piece insisting that this then-svelte, 77-inch-tall actor was the hot new guy, Vince Vaughn has been toasted with his very own
Newsweek profile by Devin Gordon, who calls him an attitude comedian who's finally come into his own. The story is basically a tribute to Vaughn's allegedly very cool performance in
The Wedding Crashers (which nearly every journo and media person in Manhattan will finally get to see this Thursday evening), but why do I have this feeling that the
Newsweek editors decided to okay the piece only...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:16 PM on Tuesday, July 5, 2005
Does everyone understand what happened last weekend to poor George Romero? On its second weekend Romero's
Land of the Dead nose-dived 73.4% and ended up with a $16,209,660 cume. This doesn't just mean that younger audiences didn't care for Romero's film, but also that his zombie visions are out-of-synch with the times. The old-fogey, slow-shuffling zombies who made their legendary debut in Romero's
Night of the Living Dead 37 years ago are done for -- the fast-sprinting zombies in Danny Doyle's
28 Days Later and the ones in Zack Snyder's
Dawn of the Dead remake obviously have struck more of a chord....
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:44 PM on Tuesday, July 5, 2005
I've gotta jump into this reporters-going-to-jail thing for a second. It's too bad that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is being a total prick and urging that
Time reporter Matthew Cooper and the
New York Times reporter Judith Miller be sent to the slammer for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert C.I.A. operative. It's a little bit wimpy for Cooper and Miller to ask to be sent to a couple of summer-camp prisons, but it's still incredibly shitty of Fitzgerald to say no, fuck you, do your time with hard-core cons in a...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:55 PM on Tuesday, July 5, 2005
A survey of moviegoer response to War of the Worlds done last week (or weekend) is coming up "fair," which is roughly equivalent to a CinemaScore rating of about 70. This means it's going to see a fairly steep drop in business next weekend -- not catastrophic but precipitous.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:10 PM on Tuesday, July 5, 2005
In Sharon Waxman's latest
box-office-slump story in the
N.Y. Times, she reports that Paramount executives are seeing no evidence of any
War of the Worlds revenue slippage due to Tom Cruise's eccentric behavior on the promo circuit. "[Cruise's] audience came out in greater numbers than ever before" for this film, Paramount vice-chairman Rob Friedman tells Waxman. "I think the world separates the star and celebrity from a movie actor and the performance on screen, and this shows that completely." I'm hearing this is precisely what Par execs are
not discerning in the tea leaves. I'm told there's been some muttering in...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:56 AM on Tuesday, July 5, 2005
"Like the rivets popping off the wing of an airliner"....good one! The Tom Wolfe-ian wordsmith is D.J. LaChapelle, webmaster for
TomCruiseIsNuts.com. The quote was given to
Daily News "Lowdown" columnist
Lloyd Grove: "What really inspired us was Tom's appearance on the
Today show. His body language, the way he got in Matt Lauer's face -- it was all pretty amazing. Watching one of America's best actors coming unglued -- like the rivets popping off the wing of an airliner -- there's a kind of fascination."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:53 AM on Tuesday, July 5, 2005
That $113.3 million that
War of the Worlds earned over the last six days since opening last Wednesday (6.29) may sound good in the trade stories, but believe me, Paramount distribution execs are disappointed. "They're crying about this," a marketing veteran is telling me, because "they didn't make the $150 million they were hoping for over the first six days." And now they're probably looking at only $200 million or a bit more domestically. (They'll have $150 or $160 million by the end of next weekend, and then the fall-off will kick in more severely.) Add in video and foreign and they're looking...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:37 PM on Monday, July 4, 2005
I'm hearing "no," "forget it," "terrible," etc. on Fantastic Four (20th Century Fox, 7.8), which I never wanted to see anyway, and a friend of a close relation is saying Walter Salles' Dark Water (Disney, 7.8) doesn't make it. (How could that be? The hand of Walter Salles has been nothing if not assured in his past films.) I'd normally wait and make my own calls in the proper time frame, but there haven't been any Manhattan screening invites in my inbox. The downbeat Dark Water word will probably translate into a weak box-office showing, but Fantastic Four is expected to debut hugely.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:40 AM on Monday, July 4, 2005
That concern I expressed about Cameron Crowe possibly allowing for a Walter Parkes-styled pruning of
Elizabethtown (Paramount, 10.14) is, I'm told, not a concern. The panic spasms began with Crowe telling
Benjamin Wagner of MTV News that "the movie's still a little long" and that test screeners are asking what parts can be cut out, etc. (See 7.2 Word item about the "long and important" version.) But just after that Word item ran I heard Crowe recently threw together "an experimental short cut" for his team to consider, and that after this screening it "[they] all looked at each...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:51 AM on Monday, July 4, 2005
"Making people laugh is the lowest form of humor." -- the late and very wise Michael O'Donoghue.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:14 AM on Monday, July 4, 2005
Yesterday's Sunday
New York Times piece by Jake Tapper about the continuing pattern of degradation for the National Lampoon "brand" had, of course, a familiar ring. The dumbing down of Lampoon-provided humor began 27 years ago with the success of
National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) and, at the command of thick-fingered-vulgarian publisher Matty Simmons, changing the long-since-disappeared magazine's orientation from something to be savored by witty hipsters to one that was basically about hormones and getting laid. Tapper's article starts by mentioning one of those celebrate-the-inner-gorilla recreational events for spring-breakers on South Padre Island, Texas, called the National Lampoon Greek Games. "Greek...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:11 AM on Monday, July 4, 2005
All day yesterday I was chipping away at a lead piece about Jacques Audiard's
The Beat That My Heart Skipped but it never quie got there. One of the hang-ups was trying to explain in plain terms the half-feral, curiously charismatic quality that Romain Duris brings to his lead role. I guess I'll post next Wednesday (7.6), but in the meantime know that this reimagining of James Toback's
Fingers is truly one of the year's best. (Along with
Hustle & Flow,
Cinderella Man,
Grizzly Man,
Mad Hot Ballroom Crash,
Cronicas,
The Beautiful Country and ...I'm a little surprised I'm including this...
Last...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:09 AM on Saturday, July 2, 2005
In an
interview with MTV News' Benjamin Wagner,
Elzabethtown director-writer Cameron Crowe says "the movie's still a little long." Wagner goes "no!" and Crowe says, "The guy who runs the focus group asks, 'What would you cut out?' And the group immediately starts arguing. One person says, 'Well you can cut this' and someone else says, 'Are you crazy? You can't cut that!' Then this girl says, 'Well, you know, it's really hard to know where to cut 'cause it's long and important.' So we've been joking about that. We called the cut 'long and important.' But it can't be...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:15 AM on Saturday, July 2, 2005
Will Russell Surf?
Would you believe David O. Russell as the director of a big pandering Silver Surfer flick? Does this play even as a radical idea? Can anyone envision an impassioned eccentric like Russell working for a nuts-and-bolts type like Avi Arad?
Consider this interview with Arad, chairman and CEO of Marvel Studios, that ran on MTV.com about ten days ago. In the piece, written by Larry Carroll, Arad is asked who might direct the Surfer flick, which will apparently begin shooting either later this year or early next.
Didn't Quentin Tarantino speak about writing...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:00 PM on Friday, July 1, 2005
Research-screening numbers for The Wedding Crashers (New Line, 7.15) have always been fairly high but yesterday's (6.30) tracking report says that awareness levels are just okay...not any better than they were for Monster-in-Law two weeks out. Since it's playing well, the obvious solution would be to sneak it next weekend.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:22 AM on Friday, July 1, 2005
Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Warner Bros., 7.15) is tracking very big. The trailer makes it groaningly clear this is one of those heavily painted, what-you-see-is-what-you-get films...which American audiences have alway tended to wet themselves over. I guess I'm different because it definitely gave me pause. Is Burton over? Is it fair to ask if he has another Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands or Beetlejice in him? I wonder.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:07 AM on Friday, July 1, 2005
Jett says he's sick to death of superhero team-spirit movies and that Tim Story's Fantastic Four flick (20th Century Fox, 7.8) is therefore going to suck it next weekend. The tracking says he's wrong -- it'll end up somewhere in the mid $30 million range....maybe higher. Jett's age group isn't the target audience anyway; this is more of a family-trade film for the not-very-hip.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:23 AM on Friday, July 1, 2005
Okay, all right...the Butterscotch Stallion, the Butterscotch Stallion, the Butterscotch Stallion...the whirlwind holy-hell
Butterscotch Stallion! It's like one of those
songs that get into your head and you can't flush out to save your life. I paid no attention to the original "Page Six"
item when it ran a week ago last Tuesday (6.21) but now it's stuck in my head and it won't go away. And here comes
The Wedding Crashers (New Line, 7.15) to keep it all going.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:45 AM on Friday, July 1, 2005
Those
Tom O'Neil calls about the lead Oscar ponies are way early, obviously, but they sound reasonable. It's cool that O'Neil shares my excitement about George Clooney's
Goodnight, and Good Luck (Warner Bros., October) as something that might warrant excitement. It may sound presumptuous to speculate that David Straitharn's portrayal of Edward R. Murrow during his ethical showdown against Sen. Joseph McCarthy might (who knows?) punch through on its own terms...but when has Straitharn ever dropped the ball? I've only one concern: Murrow's mystique was very dependent upon the sound of that soothingly authoritative
voice of his and I'm wondering...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:19 AM on Friday, July 1, 2005
It needs to be clearly understood as far in advance as possible that
The Legend of Zorro, the Antonio Banderas-Catherine Zeta-Jones movie called coming out on 10.18, should not expect and won't in fact get any support from this corner. Pay no attention to that earnestly-reported
here-comes-Zorro piece by Lewis Beale that ran in the L.A. Times
Calendar section on 6.28. The original Martin Campbell Zorro movie was self-consciously flamboyant crap and a creative embarassment all around, and it gave rise to the money-grubbing, T-Mobile-hawking career of Catherine Zeta Jones, certainly one of the biggest capitalist-pig actresses of our time. One...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:52 AM on Friday, July 1, 2005
Architecture doesn't make me tear up like movies do, but I can't suppress this, can't keep it down any longer: I feel crestfallen when I look at the
new Freedom Tower design. The building itself is okay, but that pointy, top-of-the-building thing looks inelegant...like a hypodermic needle drawn by a nine year-old. That off-center, see-through beacon thing that sat on top of the
old Freedom Tower design (i.e., the one announced on 12.20.03) was much more striking for its delicacy and unusualness....it really had something. The newly designed one feels too square and so-whatty.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:31 AM on Friday, July 1, 2005